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Card Edge Connector
Industrial, IT Datacom
Behind every add-in card sits a slot that decides how long the assembly survives. CONSHARE builds this 98-position PCIe Gen4 slot for designers who want a through-hole x8 landing point that keeps its mechanical grip and its contact stability through years of installs, upgrades, and field service.
Ninety-eight positions make this an x8 slot — the format most mid-size server boards settle on, because it carries a 100 GbE NIC at line rate today and leaves headroom for whatever lands next year. Eight Gen4 lanes at 16 GT/s each move roughly 16 GB/s, enough for line-rate networking, NVMe adapters, and GPU risers with margin to spare.
Standard keying lets an x1, x4, or x8 edge card seat fully and run immediately, so a board built for mixed populations can qualify one connector everywhere. An x16 edge will not fit — that is a 164-position part.
The slot does not set link speed; it keeps the channel disciplined enough for the PHY to train at Gen4. That means consistent contact geometry on 1.0 mm pitch, controlled impedance through the transition, and crosstalk contained between neighboring positions. Older cards are unaffected — a Gen1–Gen3 edge seats and runs at its own speed with zero changes.
Add-in cards go in blind. The technician pressing a card home cannot see the contact beams at the bottom of the slot, and an edge that enters at the wrong angle stubs a beam, bends it, and quietly turns one lane in eight into an intermittent fault that surfaces months later.
The roofed posts at the ends of the housing solve the first few millimeters of that insertion. The post funnels the card edge into the entrance at the intended angle, and the shroud over it covers exactly the zone where beam damage happens. It also shields the slot mouth from debris and from screwdrivers working the adjacent bracket screws.
The economics are lopsided, in your favor: a bent contact means board-level rework or an RMA; a guide post costs a few grams of resin. For anything that will be serviced in the field, it is among the cheapest reliability decisions on the BOM.
Each contact carries a nickel underplate of at least 30 μ", gold on the mating area, tin on the solder area — deliberately separated. Gold stays oxide-free at the interface, holding contact resistance flat across thermal cycling and humid storage. Tin belongs in the joint, because gold dissolved into a solder fillet embrittles it. Plating both zones with one metal is how budget slots fail in both directions at once.
This version ships with flash gold at the contact area. Where the slot will see repeated service cycles or corrosive air, the same part runs with thicker gold at the interface — 3, 5, 10, 15, or 30 microinches — with solder-side tin held at 80 μ" minimum across the whole ladder.
The 3.1 mm DIP tails match 1.6 mm PCB stock: enough protrusion for a solid wave-solder fillet, no excess poking into the space behind the board. Longer tails are available for 2.0 mm and 3.0 mm stackups, and the match matters — a short tail through thick stock barely peeks out and fillets badly, while an overlong tail invites interference behind the board. Through-hole anchoring itself is the point: bracket-screw torque, heavy card mass, and shipping vibration are loads that peel surface-mounted slots off their pads.
Rating | Value | What it means in the field |
|---|---|---|
Insertion force | 1.15 N max per contact pair | Card seating effort scales predictably with positions — assemblers feel no surprises |
Durability | 50 mating cycles | Install-and-upgrade duty, not test-socket duty; service-heavy slots should step up the gold option |
Current per contact | 1.1 A min | Headroom for the 12 V rails feeding an x8 card |
Contact resistance | 30 mΩ max, initial | Clean day-one signal path; the gold interface keeps it there after years |
Insulation / withstand | 1000 MΩ at 500 V DC; 500 V AC, no breakdown | Fault margins that stop a single event from cascading board-wide |
Operating temperature | −25 °C to +85 °C | Covers server inlets and industrial enclosures alike |
The housing is LCP with 30% glass loading, UL94 V-0, molded in black. LCP holds molding tolerance through solder heat and absorbs almost no moisture, so wave-soldered boards do not come out with warped or swollen housings — a documented weakness of nylon alternatives.
Start with the lane math, and size for the card that arrives next year, not the one in hand:
Edge card | Positions | Gen4 bandwidth | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
x1 | 36 | ~2 GB/s | Wi-Fi, serial I/O, control cards |
x4 | 64 | ~8 GB/s | NVMe adapters, 25 GbE NICs |
x8 | 98 | ~16 GB/s | 100 GbE, RAID, HBAs, GPU risers |
x16 | 164 | ~32 GB/s | Full-size GPUs, accelerators |
Five things to settle before the purchase order goes out:
Board thickness. It sets tail length — 3.1 mm tails for 1.6 mm stock.
Hole pattern. Follow the recommended PCB layout; its ±0.05 mm tolerance keeps tails straight and fillets symmetric.
Solder process. DIP tails suit wave soldering; pin-in-paste works where no wave exists, if stencil apertures are sized for adequate hole fill.
Plating tier. Flash gold for install-and-forget boards; thicker gold where cards get swapped or the air is humid.
Compliance and packing. RoHS and halogen-free versions exist; trays for assembly lines, cartons for volume shipments.
Server boards with mixed add-in populations. One qualified connector serves a 100 GbE NIC, an HBA, and an empty slot held for field upgrades. The spare slot costs nothing until a card goes into it.
Industrial backplanes and vision chassis. Frame grabbers and capture cards live with vibration and temperature swings. The LCP housing and through-hole anchoring are the reason this part belongs in that environment instead of a cheaper SMT slot.
GPU riser and extension boards. Dense compute builds route x8 links to vertically mounted cards. When the operator cannot see the slot mouth at all, the guided entrance earns its keep twice over.
Every lot passes 100% electrical screening — continuity and dielectric withstand — before packing, with plating thickness sampled against the specified microinch minimums and housing dimensions audited against the card-pattern gauges. Engineering samples ship from stock rather than from a queue, and repeat orders run on short, stable lead times. If the standard plating ladder does not match your environment, the thicker-gold options are orderable without a new tooling project: same contacts, same housing, different gold.
Yes. The outline is standard CEM geometry; the link trains at whatever the card supports.
Yes — standard keying accepts shorter edges. An x16 edge will not enter.
For a slot installed once and upgraded occasionally, that is exactly the duty it is rated for. If cards get swapped weekly, budget the cycles deliberately and order a thicker gold option.
Both work with DIP tails. Without a wave on the line, confirm aperture sizing for proper hole fill before committing the build.
Send board thickness and annual volume to CONSHARE; engineering samples typically ship from stock, with batch lead times held stable on repeat orders.
