Reducing High Temperature System Development Cycle Time and Cost with Additively Manufactured Connectors

Abstract

Connectors are a fundamental part of Ozark IC’s high temperature modules from characterization and test packages to Ozark IC’s XNode® data acquisition and single-board computing modules. Development of rugged high temperature electronic systems requires the co-development of similarly rugged high temperature connectors. The design and development of connector solutions enable test and evaluation of high temperature systems which would otherwise require fulfillment of a commercial connector order. There is a nascent supply chain of rugged, high temperature-rated connector designs but manufacturer lead times for such commercial products can exceed an entire design, prototype, and test cycle. Such delays are incompatible with rapid design iterations and fail-fast strategies employed in the development of extreme environment electronics – especially when the design and test cycles can change the requirements or specifications of the connectors. Polymer and ceramic additive manufacturing techniques enable in-house connector fabrication and support a connector co-development cycle that complements the pace and interdependent requirements of high temperature system development. These solutions are simple and reliable under laboratory conditions, operating for thousands of hours at 200 °C [1] and hundreds of hours at 800 °C [2]. The use of proprietary connectors manufactured with additive techniques and digital tooling lends an extra degree of freedom to system design and enables the trade-off of connector with system design specifications that greatly accelerates system ruggedization. Electrical connectors represent the final interface between an electronics module and the outside world. A failure of a connector is a failure of packaging that makes the module opaque to the tester and renders the power and robustness of any electronic system moot.