This variant of the Technobox P/N 8600 VPX Paddle Card is designed expressly to permit accessing and breaking out signals of front side wafers of VPX backplane connectors (both 3U and 6U).
Industrial Temperature
This variant of the Technbox 8600 VPX Paddle Card is designed expressly to permit accessing and breaking out signals of front side wafers of VPX backplane connectors (both 3U and 6U). Like the 8600, this device consists of a 16-wafer VPX “RP1” connector from which the wafers are wired to four 18-pin 0.1” dual row headers. An additional 18-pin header collects the single ended signal from the odd wafers. The fundamental difference between the 8600 and 8861 is how the RP1 connector is oriented, being “flipped” so that it is coplanar with the header-side of the device.
The differential pairs are routed differentially to the headers such that a twist-and-flat ribbon cable can be used to convey the signals to external equipment. Sixteen (16) of the 18 pins are used for the differential pairs, while the remaining two are used for common mode signal ground.
The single-ended signals have a dedicated ground per signal, resulting in an alternating single / ground presentation on a ribbon cable. For user convenience, the 8861 VPX paddle card is supplied with five 18-pin IDC headers, along with the strain reliefs. Users can provide their own readily-available ribbon cable materials. A set of five IDC ribbon connectors is provided with each 8861. A bench press is required to affix the ribbon cables to the IDC headers.
The 8861 VPX Paddle Card avoids sometimes clumsy and confusing individual “wafer cables,” and provides improved cable management. Besides being used for front wafers, the 8861 can be used as well to access the rear transition modules. In fact both can be employed in tandem, with a 1:1 correspondence between the front and rear connectors.
