Samtec TSM 2.54mm Surface-Mount Pin Header — 0.100" Pitch Board-to-Board Interconnects

The TSM series is Samtec's workhorse 0.100" (2.54 mm) pitch surface-mount pin header — the male half of a board-to-board or wire-to-board connection. You see these everywhere: stacked PCBs in industrial controllers, mezzanine cards in test equipment, programming headers on development boards. They mate with Samtec's SSW, SSQ, or BCS socket strips, giving you a complete disconnectable interconnect with nothing but two SMT parts.

What problem this solves

When you need to join two parallel PCBs at a fixed stack height — say a power board to a logic board inside a motor drive — you have a few choices. You can use a flex cable (adds BOM cost and assembly steps), a card-edge connector (commits you to a specific board thickness), or you can drop in a TSM+SSW pair. The pair gives you a gas-tight BeCu contact at every pin, surface-mount processing on both boards (no through-hole hand soldering), and stack heights from roughly 5 mm upward depending on the mating socket and pin length you pick.

Compared to Samtec's TFM/SFM 0.050" micro header family, TSM trades density for mechanical robustness. The 0.025" square posts withstand more insertion/withdrawal cycles than the slimmer TFM pins, and the larger pitch means you get wider solder fillets — helpful if your pick-and-place registration isn't perfect on a panelized assembly.

Typical Applications

• Motor drives and servo amplifiers — carrying gate-drive signals and low-current power between stacked control and power-stage boards
• Bench test and measurement gear — mezzanine cards inside oscilloscopes, DAQ units, and arbitrary waveform generators where modularity matters
• Embedded development — the ubiquitous 0.1" programming/debug header you find on ARM Cortex debug pods and FPGA breakout boards
• Industrial I/O modules — pluggable analog input cards that mate to a DIN-rail carrier board inside PLC remote-I/O stations
• Medical diagnostic instruments — where through-hole rework isn't practical and every joint must survive thermal cycling from sterilization

Key Technical Specifications

How to Select a TSM Variant

Start with the number of positions and rows — standard breakaway strips let you cut to length, but if you need keyed polarization, order exact-position parts with the missing-pin option. Next, pick pin plating: gold for anything that mates more than a handful of times or lives in a condensing-humidity environment; tin for one-time assembly (programming headers that get a Tag-Connect pogo cable rather than a socket).

Pin length dictates your board-to-board gap. The TSM-1XX series comes in several post heights — measure your intended stack-up including PCB thickness on both sides, then add 0.5 mm clearance for solder joint standoff. Samtec publishes detailed stack-height tables for every TSM/SSW combination; pull those before you model the enclosure.

For automated assembly, specify tape-and-reel packaging rather than bulk; the LCP insulator body is fully compatible with lead-free reflow profiles and won't warp at 260°C peak.

Procurement

Samtec ships TSM products from stock on most standard position counts and plating options. Lead times for non-standard pin counts or selective gold plating typically run 2–3 weeks. If you are prototyping, Samtec's free sample program covers many TSM configurations — request through your local distributor. For production volumes, the TSM series is priced competitively against generic 0.1" headers from Molex or TE, with the difference being Samtec's coplanarity spec (≤0.10 mm vs. 0.15 mm typical on commodity equivalents), which matters when your board has a fine-pitch BGA nearby and you need flatness across the connector.