Other Ribbon

A ribbon cable (also known as multi-wire planar cable) is a cable with many conducting wires running parallel to each other on the same flat plane. As a result the cable is wide and flat. more...

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Its name comes from the resemblance of the cable to a piece of ribbon (which is likewise wide and flat).

Ribbon cables are commonly seen for internal peripherals in computers, such as hard drives, CD drives and floppy drives. On some older computer systems (such as the BBC Micro) they were commonly used for external connections as well. Unfortunately the ribbon-like shape makes them awkward to handle, especially when there are a lot of them, and so round cables have almost entirely replaced ribbon cables for external connections.

Color-coding

To reduce the risk of reversed connections—which could potentially damage hardware—either when making a cable or when using a cable with unpolarised connectors, one edge of the cable is usually marked with a red stripe. By convention the edge with the stripe is connected to pin 1 on the connector. This method of identification is fine for cables that just consist of two or more IDC connectors with every connector connecting to every wire, but is somewhat less helpful when individual wires or small groups of wires must be terminated separately.

To make it easier to identify individual conductors in a cable; ribbon-cable manufacturers introduced rainbow ribbon cable, which uses a repeating pattern of colors borrowed from the standard resistor color code (Brown is pin 1 or pin 11 or pin 21, etc. Red is pin 2 or pin 12 or pin 22, etc). However, this has remained a specialized and relatively expensive product.

Cable sizes

Ribbon cables are usually specified by two numbers: the spacing or pitch of the conductors, and the number of conductors or ways. Conventionally, a spacing of 0.05 inch (1.27 mm) was the norm, allowing for a two-row connector with a pin spacing of 0.1 inch (2.54 mm). This size is still used today in floppy-disk-drive cables and older or custom Parallel ATA cables, as well as many more specialized applications.

The "number of conductors" is usually restricted to a few values, These include 4,6,8,9,10,14,15,16,18,20,24,25,26,34,37,40,50,60,64 and 80.

The rare 12 pin flatcable can be found at 3M

The high-speed ATA cable used for ULTRA-ATA 66 and above has 0.025-inch (0.64-mm) pitch and 80 ways. The 40-pin connection is still used, but with special connectors that ground every other wire in the 80-way cable. Finer pitches, as small as 0.3 mm, are found in portable electronic equipment, such as laptops; however, portable electronic equipment usually uses FFC(Flexible Flat Cables).

Read more at Wikipedia.org