Flexible flat cable

Flexible flat cable, or FFC, refers to any variety of electrical cable that is both flat and flexible. A flexible flat cable is a type of flexible electronics. However, the term FFC usually refers to the extremely thin flat cable often found in high density electronic applications like laptops and cell phones. Sometimes the term FPC (flexible printed circuit) is even—somewhat inaccurately—used for any type of FFC^{[citation needed]}, however this is more accurately used to describe circuits that incorporate components and are built onto a flexible material. FFCs are usually straight connections without any components. FFC is a miniaturized form of ribbon cable, which is also flat and flexible. The cable usually consists of a flat and flexible plastic film base, with multiple metallic conductors bonded to one surface. Often, each end of the cable is reinforced with a stiffener to make insertion easier or to provide strain relief. The stiffener makes the end of the cable slightly thicker.

The conductors are insulated by a polyester (polyethylene naphthalenate).

Specifications

Pitch: The spacing of the conductors. The pitch typically refers to the distance from the center of one conductor to the center of its neighboring conductor. A single FFC can have different pitches between different conductors on the same cable, however this is uncommon. FFC cables are available in many pitches, such as 0.500 mm, 0.625 mm, 0.635 mm, 0.800 mm, 1.00 mm, 1.25 mm, 1.27 mm, 2.00 mm, 2.54 mm, but the most common pitches are 0.500 mm and 1.00 mm.
Exposure length: The length of the electrical contact that has been exposed at the termination of the cable.
Stiffener: Most FFCs have some sort of extra material attached on the opposite side of the exposed length of the cable to facilitate ZIF or LIF connections.
Conductors size: The width and thickness of the conductors

References

External links

This computer hardware article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.