This invention relates to an electrical connector for use in electric and electronic appliances and more particularly to an electrical connector improved in shielding to deal with high-speed information transmission.
FIG. 6 partly illustrates a hitherto used electrical connector viewed from a mating connector. Such an electrical connector of the prior art has a substantially rectangular parallelepiped configuration and includes mainly an insulator and contacts fixed thereto. These contacts may be divided into signal contacts (+S1), phase inversion signal contacts (−S1) with an inverted phase, and ground contacts (G). These contacts are arranged in a manner such that the signal contacts and the phase inversion signal contacts are in pairs and these pairs are surrounded by the ground contacts as shown in FIG. 6.
The signal, phase inversion signal and ground contacts are arranged in the insulator in the manner described above in order to improve the shielding effect to deal with high-speed transmission. Even with fine or narrow pitches of contacts, however, gaps between the ground contacts become rather wider so that shielding effect could not be sufficiently obtained and hence information transmission speed would be objectionably limited to values of the order of several hundreds mega bits per second.