Quadrant completes major cable contract with top European research lab

The contract was won against fierce competition from many countries and the task posed a challenging electronic and mechanical specification. In addition to the tight tolerances required to meet the mechanical demands, time delays produced by the cables had to be accurate to +/- 5ps.

To achieve this Quadrant produced jigs to replicate the DESY equipment and then simplified the mechanics by removing several bends from the original design. This allowed production volumes to be made on Quadrant’s purpose-built, 3-axis bending machine and the result was the production of highly accurate and repeatable cables manufactured from tin-plated aluminium RG405/U. Terminated with Telegärtner gold-plated SMA plugs these assemblies achieved signal propagation delays of 667ps, 1,000ps and 1,337ps with a tolerance of +/- 3.5ps, exceeding the set target.

Quadrant sales and marketing director, David Phillips, said: “This project confirms our position as a major player in the international semi-rigid cable assembly market and confirms our ability to produce assemblies in large volume at the highest standards of quality and accuracy.”

DESY is one of the world’s leading centres for research on particle accelerators offering a combination of particle physics and research with photons that is unique in Europe.