FCI’s DensiShield^™ I/O system is designed to support the transmission of high-speed, serial differential signals, while taking customers’ equipment packaging requirements into consideration. Combining high density, mechanical robustness, and ease of assembly with excellent shielding and signal integrity performance means that system designers no longer have to compromise. The DensiShield connector is built around a wafer system employing a differential pair construction where each pair is shielded from the adjacent pair and the adjacent wafer. The connector is ideally suited for 4 bi-directional channels working >2.5Gb/s, similar to Infiniband or XAUI links, but can also perform at much higher data rates. The 8-pair DensiShield connectors feature a low-profile, enabling use in dense systems having board-to-board spacing is as low as 15mm, and can be mounted on 12.5mm pitch side-by-side enabling multiple ports along a card edge. In addition, the long engagement length and short cable exit inherent to the DensiShield connector design allows more compact cable routing when compared to other high-speed cabling solutions,. The connector can also be configured to handle low-speed signals and power and is also available in selectively-loaded versions, thereby allowing system designers to benefit from density and robustness offered by this connector system in applications that do not require high-speed signaling.