For my fist blog of the year I thought I’d start with a new product innovation from 3M. For those of you who are into high-speed data then this is for you!
The 3M Internal Twin Axial Ribbon Cable SL8800 Series is a new ultra low-profile, high-speed, high signal density cable. The products in the SL8800 Series are only the first of a new family of high-performance cables from 3M.
The information in the 3M tech specs state the SL8800 Cable Series is a longitudinally shielded cable construction and is made to exacting tolerances. The cable suffers little to no resonance or “suck out,” where traditionally spiral wrapped twin axial cables exhibit an enormous loss of signal at a particular range of frequency.
The cable is also low skew, and the ribbon construction allows customers to further control any skew that can sometimes be introduced when trying to manage individual channels. This is especially critical at speeds beyond 10 Gbps. High speed applications continue to demand more performance out of the cables, and the SL8800 Series Cable will deliver that performance for years to come.
As signal speeds continue to increase, cable can improve but the termination can still be a weak point. The SL8800 Series Cable standard ribbon format supports high performance termination, repeatability, and a reduced possibility for pinout error. When stripped in parallel, and then applied in parallel, each channel results in an identical termination length. Control and placement of individual channels is not required, eliminating the variation in performance and rework due to incorrect placement.
Ok, now my take on this is that this cable really is quite special, apart from the obvious space saving this cable really does seem to be very special and offers design engineers the opportunity to save more space and increase their data throughput.
My only criticism is the cable is virtually impossible to strip and prepare for termination. The tooling is massively expensive so until the costs come down it will be difficult for many smaller OEMs to adopt. Still that is always the way with any new technology.
For more information and very interesting technical information check out the promotion video.
