pitch

Pitch refers to the pitch (RM) between component leads on chips, packages and electronic components, as well as the hole spacing of printed circuit boards, the contact spacing of interconnect connectors and the trace spacing in integrated circuits. Pitch was originally specified in inches or milliinches. One milli inch is 25.4 µm. Later, the unit of measurement for pitch was changed to metric in millimeters.

The pitch is specified as 0.5 mm. However, the designation of contact distances is not consistent. In addition to pitch, component connections that are closer together are designated as fine pitch. For some packages, 1.0 mm contact spacing is already referred to as fine pitch, while for others it is only used for pitches of 0.625 mm (0.025 inch) and below. Pitch distances of less than 0.4 mm are referred to as ultra-fine pitch (UFP). Due to miniaturization in connection with ever smaller mobile devices, there are already packages, such as the DSSP package, with a pitch of only 220 µm.

Pitch between two chip connections

In addition to pitch and fine pitch, there is also half pitch (hp). This designation is used when the trace and the trace space have the same width. The specification half-pitch is determined by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS).