Planarmag Product Technology From TE Brings Automated Embedded Magnetic Products To The Ethernet Market

“Our new technology will significantly speed product time-to-market and increase supply chain capacity while improving the overall reliability and quality of our product. It helps minimize cost impacts, which arise from labor pool instability and increasing labor costs,” says Sabi Varma, Director of Magnetics, TE. “This technology is truly an innovation for Ethernet products.”

The new PlanarMag product technology capitalizes on three innovations to dramatically improve the design and manufacture of electromagnetic components:
• Use of proprietary material to embed highly sensitive magnetic ferrites into standard PCBs
• Utilization of a 3D-electromagnetic simulator with unique design techniques to create patented proprietary winding structures
• Standard PCB processes to manufacture boards containing hundreds to thousands of parts at once, with dramatically improved performance and consistency, while utilizing semiconductor testing methodologies

TE’s initial roll out of PlanarMag products includes two new discrete Ethernet components and a 1G Mag45 ICM (part number 1840771-2) with PlanarMag product technology embedded magnetics. The discrete components are 1G BASE-T media filters (part number 2048107-1) and 10/100 BASE-T media filters (part number 2048108-1). Key product features that are common to the entire product offering include:
• Single-port configuration
• Media filter and isolation transformer.

In addition to the cost and supply benefits of automation scalability, the new PlanarMag products reduce or completely eliminate termination components because of their precision center tap and transformer symmetry. This consistency and repeatability improves performance and can help facilitate FCC class B compliance. The 10/100/1G BASE-T media filters have a 24-pin BGA configuration and the 10/100 BASE-T media filters have 12-pin castellation I/O’s (an industry standard pin-to-pin design) for customers to easily qualify and ramp production in existing products using gull-wing discrete.

The 1G Mag45 ICM is the first fully integrated connector utilizing the PlanarMag embedded magnetic product technology and is a low-profile configuration targeting applications that require reduced height and small form factor footprint such as laptop and notebook computers.

All products are RoHS-compliant per JEDEC J-STD, meet the IEEE 802.3 specification and can help facilitate FCC Class B qualifications. Product applications include low-port density switches and routers, low-profile notebooks/netbooks, desktop computers, IP routers, cable modems, set top boxes, TV/DVR, IP phones, IP cameras, video game consoles and more.