 |
| Quantity: | |
|---|---|
Card Edge Connector
Industrial, IT Datacom
A 164-position card-edge slot keeps showing up in places PCIe x16 never got retired: industrial vision frames, multi-display video walls, test instrumentation, custom accelerator cards, mining rigs, and a long tail of embedded SBCs. It survives not because of nostalgia but because 164 positions carry the full x1/x4/x8/x16 electrical envelope plus the sideband reference pins, so a single connector family can serve boards that ship in tens or thousands without a respin.
What separates a slot that survives a five-year deployment from one that comes back as an RMA is mechanical anchoring. The connector body has to stay seated when a long card is repeatedly inserted at an angle, when the chassis is jostled in transit, and when the board flexes during depanelization. The traditional through-hole form factor with the harpoon mounting posts is built exactly for that abuse, and the black housing gives the molding cycle the thermal headroom it needs.
The harpoon term refers to the barbed through-hole stakes on the connector body. They bite into the plated through-hole during wave or selective solder, and the barb geometry resists the pull-out force that a long PCIe card generates every time someone installs or removes it.
The 2.50mm lead length pairs with those harpoons so the connector sits at the correct stand-off for both through-hole and mixed-technology assembly. If you've ever seen a slot that floated up during second-side reflow, or a slot whose tails cracked at the solder fillet because the body was sitting too high, that 2.50mm lead is what fixed it.
For process engineers, the practical takeaway:
Compatible with wave solder, selective solder, and pin-in-paste reflow profiles
Lead length survives the typical 1.6mm to 2.4mm PCB thickness range without modification
Harpoon retention pulls the body flush to the board during cooling, reducing skew across the pin field
Pitch tells you more than spacing. A 1.00mm pitch on a 164-position card-edge slot balances three things at once: signal density, manufacturability, and tolerance stack-up.
At 1.00mm, the contact beam is wide enough to deliver a stable normal force without sacrificing the contact wipe distance that breaks through surface contamination. The footprint tolerates the ±0.05mm positional tolerance that a standard PCB process holds, and the contact geometry still allows the mating card edge to find the sweet spot even when there's a small chamfer mismatch on the PCB fab.
For high-vibration or mobile-embedded use, the pitch also widens the SMT pick-and-place window — 1.00mm lands are large enough that vacuum nozzles don't have to fight the cap during placement, which directly improves first-pass yield on automated lines.
The housing is glass-filled PBT rated UL94-HB minimum. PBT is the workhorse of through-hole card-edge connectors for one reason: it holds its dimensional stability across the reflow profile and doesn't outgas the way some lower-grade nylons do. The black color isn't decorative — it gives the molding cycle thermal headroom and helps mask the slight color shift that long-term aging can introduce on lighter resins.
The terminals are copper alloy at 0.25mm stock, which puts them in the sweet spot for the contact normal force target. C2680 brass is the typical alloy grade behind this kind of part, and it machines and stamps cleanly at this thickness. The plating stack is nickel underplate with gold flash (G/F) in the contact area and a tin-rich solder tail — a proven combination for mixed-flow assemblies where the contact side has to survive corrosion while the solder side has to wet cleanly without gold embrittlement at the joint.
The harpoon itself is SPCC steel with nickel underplate. SPCC gives the barb the spring memory it needs to recover its bite after the through-hole swages it during insertion, which is what keeps the body locked to the board for the life of the product.
In a custom AI accelerator card, the 164-pin vertical slot is usually the host-side socket on a passive backplane or carrier board. The retention force on the harpoon becomes the deciding factor when the card weighs half a kilo and sits at the end of a long lever arm. A slot that drifts after a few hundred insertions costs more in field service than the price difference between two connector suppliers.
In a video wall controller, the same slot shows up repeated across a backplane, so consistency of insertion force across hundreds of cycles is what determines whether the wall ever needs to be re-seated in the field. The traditional through-hole format is the format operations teams trust for that.
In industrial test rigs, the slot is often mated and de-mated dozens of times a day. The contact plating stack and the cycle rating tell you where the part is designed to live: moderate-cycle, high-reliability, not consumer-grade hot-plugging. For higher-cycle applications, CONSHARE can move the part onto a thicker gold stack without changing the footprint.
For SBCs and SoM carriers, the slot is sometimes used as a general-purpose high-speed expansion rather than strictly PCIe. The 164 pins carry enough bandwidth headroom that designers route a chunk of them to GPIO, USB 3.0, or SATA, leaving the rest for the actual PCIe lanes. That kind of repurposing only works if the slot is mechanically solid and the contact geometry stays consistent across the row.
This part is built at CONSHARE under our standard through-hole connector quality flow, which covers incoming material verification on housing resin, terminal stock, and plating chemistry; first-article dimensional reports on every production lot with Cpk data on critical features; 100% electrical continuity and hipot test on every shipped unit; and a lot-level solderability retention sample held for traceability.
Standard lead time is 4–6 weeks for the catalog configuration. For high-volume or scheduled call-off orders we can lock a rolling forecast with shorter release windows. We hold die inventory for the BR164 family, so non-cancelable, non-returnable volume is available to support design-in and pre-production builds without tooling charges.
Customization projects we routinely run on this footprint:
Tail length variation for non-standard PCB stack-ups
Plating upgrade to 15μ" or 30μ" gold in the contact area for extended service life
Color-coded housing variants (red, green, yellow, blue, purple, white) for visual keying
Halogen-free resin upgrade for product lines that need IEC 61249-2-21 compliance
Custom date code and customer-specific marking
If you're matching this slot against a competitor's part number, send us the datasheet and we'll cross-reference the mechanical envelope, plating stack, and packaging format for you.
Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
Pin count | 164 |
Contact pitch | 1.00 mm |
Lead length (DIP) | 2.50 mm |
Mounting style | Through-hole, vertical |
Retention feature | Harpoon (barbed stakes) |
Housing material | PBT, UL94-HB min., black |
Terminal material | C2680 copper alloy, 0.25 mm stock |
Terminal plating | Ni underplate, gold flash contact, tin solder tail |
Harpoon material | SPCC, Ni underplate |
Rated current | 1.1 A per pin (min.) |
Contact resistance | 30 mΩ max. |
Insulation resistance | 1000 MΩ min. |
Dielectric strength | 500 V DC / 1 min |
Insertion force | 1.15 N per contact pair max. |
Extraction force | 0.15 N per contact pair min. |
Durability | 50 cycles |
Deflection temperature | 220 °C |
Compliance | RoHS, halogen-free option |
Packing | Tube, tray, or box |
The mechanical breakdown in the section view shows the contact beam geometry, the harpoon barb profile, and the PCB keep-out envelope. Ask your CONSHARE contact for the latest revision if you're working from a cached drawing.
Yes. The 164-pin count, 1.00mm pitch, and card-edge mating geometry follow the PCIe CEM specification. Any card that drops into a standard x16 slot on a desktop board will drop into this connector.
The traditional through-hole version is mechanically stronger and is the better choice when the mating card has a long lever arm or sees frequent insertion cycles. The SMT side-entry version is intended for low-profile or compact boards where vertical real estate is at a premium and the retention force requirement is lighter.
The 50-cycle rating is a minimum guarantee under controlled lab conditions, not a hard cap. Real-world derating depends on the contact plating thickness, the angle of insertion, and whether the contact zone is being wiped clean during each cycle. For higher-cycle applications CONSHARE can move you to a thicker gold stack on the same footprint.
Yes. The "H" code in the order information indicates a halogen-free housing resin, and we can build to IEC 61249-2-21 on request.
Standard colors include red, green, yellow, blue, purple, white, and black. Custom colors are open to review on volume orders.
For catalog parts, sample quantities can be released through distribution. For custom builds, the entry point is usually a single lot at the production MOQ. Talk to your CONSHARE rep about the specific part number and configuration.
