Ardent Terminate-R, 100% Movable 40GHz+ Coax Cable Assembly
Helping Electrical Engineers Characterize High Speed Signals with No Soldering Required
Are you ready for the testing challenges you’ll face on your next multi-Gbps SERDES development project? No need to worry, the gang at Ardent Concepts has you covered! With over 2 years of R & D invested, Ardent is pleased to announce the launch of the latest product offering in its IP Portfolio, Terminate-R.™ In collaboration with reputable cable manufacturer Teledyne Storm, Ardent has developed the smallest, fastest, highest density compression mount cable assembly on the market today.
Like most ideas, the invention of Terminate-R™ was inspired by a problem—according to President and the inventor of Terminate-R, Gordon Vinther, “the Terminate-R™ was inspired at the behest of one of our largest customers who had been using another high density, high frequency cable launch system and [they had been having] delivery issues with their product.”
From that point forward, Vinther and the team at Ardent spent the next 18 months perfecting a cable termination system and “the result is a system that works well with micro-strip and stripline PCB launches to 40GHz+,” says Vinther.
After establishing a reliable cable termination system, the next step was identifying a market for this product, and according to Vinther, “Our target of core customers are those IC manufacturers using either single coaxial cable launches or higher density multiple termination products to get high speed signals off their reference designs.” These manufacturers are usually making IC’s that perform the following functions:
1. Mulitple High speed SER-DES lanes
2. FPGA Development
3. CPU’s
4. Broadband network switches
5. Optical engine manufacturers
Utilizing RC Spring Probe, a proprietary contact set also used in test sockets, Terminate-R™ is mounted to the board with two screws—no SMT components, making the entire assembly 100% movable. According to a Test Engineering Manager at a Wireless Switch company this feature is what sets Terminate-R apart from other solutions in the market today “because it allows us (their engineering team) to move the Terminate-R™ from one position to another on our board without any wasted connectors. We can put the footprint anywhere we want and move the Terminate-R™ around as we need it.”
By eliminating wasted SMT connectors that other competitors’ in this space require, customers can significantly reduce their overall costs, especially when you consider that these connectors can be used over several chip development projects: “we realize after a few projects, there will actually be a cost savings—as there is much less incremental cost with [Ardent’s] cable assembly solution compared to your competitor’s,” says a Member of Technical Staff at one of the largest graphics processor manufacturers in the world.
In addition to its cost savings benefit, the fact that Terminate-R™ is 100% movable affords engineers flexibility that SMT competitors in this space simply cannot—as a compression mount solution, Terminate-R™ allows Engineers to easily remove it from the board and use planar probes to de-embed the losses in their reference design PCB. An Engineering director at one of the largest Telecommunications companies in the world put it bluntly, “SMA’s are really annoying, [Terminate-R™ is better because it disappears.”
Terminate-R™ is available in 4, 8, 12, 16 and 24 channel versions in 2.54mm and 4mm pitch configurations. For more information, please visit the Terminate-R™ Website or feel free to contact an Engineer at Ardent directly—603-474-1760.
