What Is a Floating Connector?
A floating connector is a generic term for connectors that are used to connect electronic circuit boards and are equipped with a mechanism to adjust for small relative connection errors between boards.
Uses of Floating Connectors
Floating connectors are almost always used in situations where boards are connected by robots because they allow for mounting positional errors between boards.
Floating connectors are also useful in situations where stress on the device needs to be reduced because they not only increase the degree of freedom of board connection but also allow the release of stress between boards after connection.
For example, it is often used in situations where multiple boards are connected to each other, or where both boards are rigidly installed on the baseboard and there is no two-dimensional degree of freedom.
Principle of Floating Connectors
Connectors have an insulator, which is a part that can transmit electronic information by bonding to each other, on top of the base substrate.
The role of the connector is to join two boards through this insulator.
Now, the size of these connectors has been getting smaller year by year with the advancement of technology, and now there are multiple insulators in a row with a high density of about 0.5mm pitch between adjacent boards. When joining these insulators, it is necessary to design the misalignment between each insulator to be less than the tolerance, but this requires very high technology.
Therefore, to express the degree of freedom in the three-dimensional mounting tolerance of insulators, floating connectors use springs to make the insulators look as if they are floating in midair.
As a result, even when strain exists at the time of connection between boards, the spring part can move to absorb the error caused by its misalignment.
Even if there is no misalignment at the time of connection, the misalignment will be caused by the tolerance of the screw holes when the boards are subsequently screwed together for installation on the main board.
Floating connectors can absorb the stress-strain caused by this indirect misalignment due to their structure.