Molex Expands Copper Flex Circuit and Assembly Production Capability
29 August 2007
Molex Incorporated has begun production at its new facility in St. Paul, Minn, USA. Molex relocated to the new facility from the former Century Circuits operation Molex acquired in 2006. The new, expanded facility offers improved manufacturing process flow and provides more than double the production capacity for Copper Flex Products. The company has also made significant investments in new equipment to ensure that the facility is both more efficient and capable of producing expanded product technologies for the future.
The new facility features improved temperature and humidity controls that provide the capability to produce multi-layer flex products with more than 20 layers, which is more than a 10 percent increase in circuit density. Molex can now also prototype and manufacture rigid flex assemblies entirely under one roof, the company said.
Designed to be significantly lighter and thinner than traditional circuit boards, Copper Flex allows products to naturally be lighter without minimizing the product's high-speed integrity, Molex said. The flexible design can be bent around hardware and even over itself in order to fit into much smaller device enclosures. Materials used in the construction of the circuit assemblies have closely matching thermal expansion rates that allow Copper Flex to be resistant to hot and cold temperatures, as well as large temperature fluctuations. This property is essential for situations where high speed, low loss and real estate are important to maintain a system's operational integrity.
