The trend in today's technology is an ever-decreasing scale and increasing functional integration. Within electronics equipment, this results in fine-pitch connections and low resistance, high frequencies and high current density requirements.

Problems caused by this trend include higher assembly costs and reduced solder ability of electronic components and connectors.

As a pioneer of elastomeric Inter-Connectors, Shin-Etsu offers a wide range of Z-axis conductive elastomeric Inter-Connectors and heat seal Inter-Connectors for connecting various kinds of Liquid Crystal Displays and a wide range of other components like microphones, speakers, antenna, buzzers, Multi-Chip-Modules, MEMS and PCB's.

All Inter-Connectors are custom-made per end-users design and requirements using standardized technologies that do not require special tooling in most cases.

Using these technologies, many derivative shapes are designed to solve a variety of interconnection problems from very small scale and high volume applications like watches and cellular phones to medium or low-volume applications like professional equipments.

For the various applications, special materials have been developed in collaboration with our mother company Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd. in Japan, to provide specific characteristics like low contact resistances, high durability and low material relaxation.

The range of Inter-Connectors can be devided into groups with specific functions and use:
  * Carbon elastomers - used for z-axis connections to LCD's
  * Metal elastomers - used for z-axis connections to electronic components or board to board
  * Sheet elastomer - used for various minature connections or high frequency test purposes
  * Co-mold elastomers - integration of electric and mechanical functions
  * Heatseal foils - used for flexible film connections to LCD's