Compliant Tail Contacts

The principle for a press-fit connection is that a contact terminal is pressed into a printed circuit board (PCB).

Press-fit connectors are pressed through properly dimension plated-through holes on a printed circuit board (PCB). This technology is an alternative to the soldering method and offers a number of advantages over its more traditional counterpart. With press-fit connectors, you can eliminate a number of negative aspects that come along with soldering: thermal stress on the PCB, cold solder joints, shorts (caused by solder bridging), and the elimination of lead-free solder, which introduces its own set of problems. Press-fit connectors are also easily repaired, more environmentally friendly, and cost-effective.

The compliant pin will exhibit an elastic behavior and thus will deform during insertion (significantly reducing stress on the PCB holes). Compliant or Press Fit pin technology has long been used for the ease of assembly for PCB's by reducing the need for fluxes during the soldering process. Amphenol has applied this technology to support both the commercial and military markets including ARINC 600, MMA, R27 (M83527), D-Sub (C308) & R39 (Rectangular D38999) connector families.

FEATURES & BENEFITS

Press-fit technology is a solder-less termination enabling a permanent electrical and mechanical terminal-to-PCB connection with several distinctive advantages:

Fast processing ––> comparative data: lead time soldering vs. press-fit
Use of standard resins instead of cost-intensive heat stabilized resins in the header
Prevents thermal treatment to the header
Flexible application designs with single pin insertion due to freely programmable pin arrays in terms of pin numbers and orientation
Stand-alone pin insertion possible
Lubrication and flux aid free processing
Prevents solder paste printing and pre-heating
Environmental friendly
No shading-off issues with large header components in the post-soldering insertion
Prevents soldering defects like bridges, bad wetting, flux residuals, solder balls, spider webs thermal load and cold solder joints

COMPARISON PRESS-FIT vs SOLDERING

With the conversion to lead-free soldering, an increase of the average soldering temperature is required. To cope with this higher temperature, special and more expensive plastic materials like LCP, PPS, PPA, and PCT are needed. This disadvantage can be avoided by using press-fit technology and discard the soldering process. In that way, no expensive high-temperature plastics are needed for a lead-free application.

Single pin insertions ACTION PIN inserted into a PCB (above) and mass termination with a four-row (>100 press-fit pins) 90° header modules below.