Many factors come into play when selecting coax cable for mm wave applications. Four important attributes include ruggedness, flexibility, frequency range, and signal quality.
Nitrowave is Samtec’s new, phase- and amplitude-stable coaxial cable. You can easily recognize Nitrowave cable because of its distinctive Samtec orange jacket. Nitrowave cable offers improved stability with flexure over time.
Like most of our demos, the one above shows a Samtec connector system in an environment that mimics a real-life application. In this case, we’re measuring insertion loss and VSWR through a three-meter Nitrowave cable from DC to 43 GHz with a Keysight VNA.
But here’s what’s different: we are actively flexing the Samtec Nitrowave coax cable and showing the results in real time. The cable runs through the Samtec arcade game, where it’s subject to dynamic flexing. And you read that right — it is an arcade game, complete with a jumping tiger.
In other words, it’s not just a repetitive back-and-forth test like you see in a lab. The flexing is actually controlled by whoever is playing the game, which is closer to a real-life application.
And we were hard on it. In fact, we had a contest to see if anybody could negatively impact the cable’s performance, and it didn’t happen. Over a three-meter cable length, the IL is 8 dB, and the VSWR is 1.2.
In summary, there’s dynamic flexing, a three-meter-long Nitrowave cable assembly, at 43 GHz, Samtec 292 RF connectors, and excellent results. Samtec Nitrowave cable is designed to meet the increased demands of the aerospace, defense, datacom, computer, semiconductor, and instrumentation markets.
