Methodology of Accelerated Aging

Abstract

Outlines are given for eight alternative black-box (i.e., input-output) meth odologies that are appropriate for estimating, from external characteristics, the reliability of semiconductor lasers or other gradually degrading manufac tured products with lifetimes too long to measure directly over practical time spans. These reliability estimates, which are essential for various components of such systems as submarine communication cables or satellites, are obtained from two classes of data. One class consists of the measured properties of statistically equivalent components, i.e., samples from the manufactured pop ulation, that have been operated to failure or at least to a significant degree of degradation. This degradation is often brought about in a shortened time span through the application of a temperature or other "accelerating stress" that is large compared to the operating temperature or other stress of the intended application. The other class of data is, for each component, comprised of the predeployment properties ofthat very component, including particularly its own predeployment degradation rate (which may also be measured under accelerating stresses). Brief consideration is given in passing to important special cases when only one of these two classes of data is available.

Reliability of InGaAs waveguide photodiodes for 40-Gb/s optical receivers

“…Due to the lognormal distribution for degradation behavior of the WGPDs, failure probability of each device as a function of time can be expressed using the average device lifetime and its standard deviation in the following equation [7]:…”

“…The activation energy for the failure mechanism and the average device lifetime were subsequently computed. It was assumed that the temperature dependence of the device failure rate ( ) obeys the following Arrhenius law [7]:…”

High-performance AlGaInAs/InP 14xx-nm semiconductor pump lasers for optical amplifications

“…The wear-out degradation occurs for all the material systems such as AlGaAs/GaAs, InGaAsP/InP and AlGaInAs/InP, mainly due to enhanced nonradiative recombination taking place during the aging [15,19,20]. The sudden failure could result from catastrophic optical mirror damage (COMD) [21] or a defect-related failure (such as dark line damage) inside the bulk of the material [22].…”

Effects of having two populations of defects growing in the cavity of a semiconductor laser

“…With some approximation, we discovered that the MCM agrees with the linear extrapolation method for lifetime and activation energy. 6,8,[12][13][14] In the case of a one-component model, if the activation energy of a device is known, one could estimate the lifetime of a device at any temperature from the lifetime measurement performed under stress aging. 8,12,13 From Sim's heuristic model, 3 the lifetime of a device at any operating temperature with the knowledge of the aging behavior at an elevated temperature is given by…”