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Card Edge Connector
Industrial, IT Datacom
This is a through-hole mounted card-edge slot for PCI Express Generation 4 add-in cards, built on a 164-position contact system with a 1.00 mm pitch. The version on this page carries 3.10 mm solder tails, flash gold in the contact area, and tin-plated tails for soldering, all housed in a black glass-filled LCP body. It is written for board builders who still want the mechanical certainty of a plated through-hole termination on their Gen4 platforms — workstation motherboards, industrial control boards, test and burn-in fixtures, and any board that has to survive rough handling long after the reflow oven cools down.
The two molded posts and the overhanging roof above the contact entrance share one job: they intercept an add-in card while it is still millimeters away from the contacts and steer it toward the correct line of approach. On a 164-pin slot at 1.00 mm pitch, a card tilted even a fraction of a degree can ride over a contact beam instead of sliding between the two rows. Once a beam is bent, the slot is generally scrap — there is no field repair for it. The post takes that failure mode off the assembly operator's hands, which matters most on lines where cards are inserted and pulled dozens of times during bring-up and debug.
The roof section over the contact mouth is not decoration. Slots that sit empty in a partially assembled chassis collect dust, solder balls, and stray wire clippings, and the first card insertion grinds that debris straight into the gold. Conventional post-style slots from CONSHARE leave the contact rows exposed on top; the roofed entrance here shields them, which is why we recommend this style for boards that pass through multiple stations — printer, reflow, test, final assembly — before the card goes in.
Each of the 164 positions is formed from 0.25 mm phosphor bronze, a material choice that favors force retention over initial contact force. What that means in practice: after a card has been cycled through debug and re-insertion fifty times, the beams still grip. The rated 50-cycle durability reflects full-spec performance, not the point where things fall apart.
Contact resistance stays at or below 30 milliohms per position, and each pin carries 1.1 A minimum. That current rating matters more than it looks on paper — Gen4 add-in cards pull aux power through the slot, and pins running with thermal headroom run cooler, age slower, and give you room to route shared power across fewer unique nets during board layout. Insulation resistance holds at 1000 megohms minimum with dielectric strength verified to 500 VDC for one minute, so the slot tolerates the voltage transients common in industrial cabinets without tracking.
The plating stack on every contact is nickel first, 30 microinches minimum, then gold on the contact area and 80 microinches of tin on the solder tails. Each layer solves a different problem:
Nickel barrier — blocks copper-tin intermetallic growth, the quiet culprit behind joints that look fine at incoming inspection and crack after thermal cycling.
Flash gold on contacts — keeps contact resistance stable over long storage and repeated mating; gold does not oxidize, so a slot pulled from a tray after a year in a warehouse mates like a fresh one.
Tin on tails — wets cleanly in both wave soldering and pin-in-paste reflow, with enough thickness to survive a second pass without dewetting.
SMT non-slotted slots dominate high-volume consumer boards, but through-hole retains real advantages on boards built in lower volumes or handled harder: the 3.10 mm tails anchor the connector against card insertion force, solder joints are visually inspectable from the bottom side, and paste-in-hole processes let you run the connector through standard reflow without a separate wave step. If your board already has other PTH parts, this slot adds no new process.
The connector family comes with three solder tail lengths, each suited to a different board stack-up:
Tail length | Best suited for |
|---|---|
2.50 mm | Thin boards, tight chassis clearances, minimal protrusion below the PCB |
3.10 mm (this page) | Standard 1.6 mm FR-4 with paste-in-hole or wave soldering |
3.50 mm | Thicker or multi-layer stack-ups needing longer joint fill |
If your PCB is a standard 1.57 mm board and you are unsure, start with this 3.10 mm version — it is the volume configuration and carries the shortest lead time.
Flash gold is the right call for most applications, but the contact finish scales with how the board lives after assembly:
Finish level | Recommended when |
|---|---|
Flash gold (this page) | Standard mounting cycles, controlled storage, lowest cost |
3–5 µin gold | Cards inserted and removed regularly during service |
10–15 µin gold | Frequent hot-swap or high-cycle test fixtures |
30 µin gold | Corrosive atmospheres, telecom cabinets, longest service life |
Housings can also be specified halogen-free for products shipping into markets that restrict halogenated flame retardants — worth confirming at the RFQ stage if your end customer is in the EU.
Every lot passes dimensional and electrical sampling before packing — contact resistance, insertion and withdrawal force, and coplanarity of the tail row, since a single high tail can hold a connector out of the paste. Insertion force is held to 1.15 N per contact pair maximum, low enough that a full-height card seats by hand without a mallet and without flexing the PCB. Withdrawal force stays above 0.15 N per pair so cards stay put in shipping and vibration.
Finished connectors ship in C-trays oriented to protect the posts, with lot traceability back to the stamping and plating batches. For volume customers CONSHARE supports: custom tail lengths and gold thicknesses beyond the standard table, selective gold placement to cut precious metal cost, labeled packaging matched to your warehouse part numbering, and engineering review of your PCB footprint before tooling starts — the footprint questions are the ones that save the most money, because they get answered before copper is etched, not after.
Mechanically yes, a Gen5 card will seat and make contact. Electrically the slot is validated to Gen4 signaling at 16 GT/s; running Gen5 data rates through it is untested and not something we would put in writing. For Gen5 designs ask us about our shielded Gen5 slot line instead.
PA66 absorbs moisture and can deform through reflow profiles on thick boards; LCP with 30% glass filler holds its mold dimensions across both reflow and wave exposure, which is what keeps 164 tails aligned to 164 plated holes.
–25 °C to +85 °C, covering the standard commercial and light-industrial envelope.
Do you support low-volume orders for prototyping? Yes — sample quantities ship from the standard configuration, and lead times scale sensibly from prototype to production volumes. Send the board thickness and expected insertion cycles with your inquiry and the team will confirm the variant that fits.
