Stripline flexible cable to printed circuit board attachment system

DETAILED DESCRIPTION In accordance with the foregoing objects, a method of solder attaching an insulated electrical lead in a cable to a solder coated soldering pad located on a printed circuit board is accomplished by exposing at least a bottom region of the lead's insulation, while retaining the top region of insulation and tinning the exposed lead portion; placing the tinned lead portion in contact with the solder coated soldering pad; and heating the top region of insulation overlying the exposed lead portion to permit heat to permeate through the insulation, the exposed lead portion and the soldering pad to reflow the solder on each, whereby the solder solidifies upon withdrawal of the heating source and makes the attachment.
The present invention is in part based on the discovery that it is possible to raise the temperature of the tinned exposed leads to the eutectic temperature without direct physical contact between those leads and the heating source, the hot bar.
Instead it is discovered that the heating source can be applied to the electrical insulation and sufficient heat will nonetheless be conducted through that insulation and then to the electrical leads sufficient to raise the temperature to the leads to the eutectic temperature of solder and cause the solder to reflow, and without physically damaging the cable's electrical insulation.
This discovery has been made in practice using a flexible ribbon cable manufactured by the Tech-Etch company of Plymouth, Mass.
, a cable which employs a Kapton brand polyimide material for the insulating dielectric; and it is expected to have application to other cables that use equally robust dielectric materials.
The foregoing and additional objects and advantages of the invention together with the structure characteristic thereof, which was only briefly summarized in the foregoing passages, becomes more apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading the detailed description of a preferred embodiment, which follows in this specification, taken together with the illustration thereof presented in the accompanying drawings