We are concerned with assuring the reliability of semiconductor lasers intended for an application in which the design lifetime is long, replacement or redundancy is impossible or impractical, and the failure of even a few lasers could be disastrous. In the search for a reliability assurance strategy that will meet our objectives, we have carefully examined the well-known and widely used bathtub and lognormal approaches. Based upon our understanding of the expected aging behavior of lasers, we propose an alternative reliability assurance strategy that we believe to be an improvement over the traditional approaches. The object is not how to make reliable lasers, but rather how to confidently predict, in a timely fashion, which lasers in a given population will endure beyond the intended system lifetime. Particular emphasis is placed upon initially imposed overstress regimes that address the anticipated presence of transient modes of depadation and infant failure modes with low thermal activation energies that may be invulnerable to detection during accelerated thermal aging. Since lasers degrade gradually rather than fail suddenly, comparable emphasis is placed upon monitoring the stabilized long-term degradation rates of the survivors of the overstress regimes so as to permit lifetime predictions of individual lasers.

Selection of a laser reliability assurance strategy for a long-life application

Double heterostructure (Al, Ga) As injection lasers are efficient, easily modulated emitters of light in the wavelength range 0.8 < λ < 0.9 μm. They are being widely applied as sources, especially in various fiber-optic communications applications. This paper describes several of the most important directions of current applied research and development on these devices with emphasis on reliability, optical linearity, and temporal stability.

Current directions in GaAs laser device development

The authors derive a model of active semiconductor device aging to predict end of mission life device parameters by extrapolating from early environmental and electrical test measurements. Beginning from mass action kinetics first principles, the model develops an envelope average of physico-chemical damage reaction kinetics of limited source amounts of contaminating reactants. Corroborating experimental and test data are included. >

A practical end-of-life model for semiconductor devices

Undersea lightwave systems need receivers with the utmost in both reliability and sensitivity. Our design has evolved from the type which we provided for an earlier deep-sea trial. The primary features of our present receiver are an InGaAs planar p-i-n photodiode with passivation and antireflection coating and a Si bipolar integrated circuit, both encapsulated in a special chip carrier. Both the photodiode and the amplifier are placed in the same carrier so that a direct chip-to-chip wire bond can minimize stray capacitance, which helps to maximize sensitivity. The back-illuminated structure of the photodiode allows the InP substrate to serve as a window in the hermetically sealed carrier. Since both active devices are in a separate package from the passive components, they can undergo the high temperature bake-out and hermetic seal followed by the high temperature high bias purge necessary to assure the reliability of the semiconductors. This optical chip carrier is then mounted inside another hermetic package which contains the passive components, including the optical fiber pigtail, which must undergo bake-out and seal at more moderate temperatures. Within the constraints of reliability, bandwidth, and dynamic range, the physical structure of the integrated circuit and its bias conditions have been chosen to maximize sensitivity. The design of the circuit enables us to select those devices from a production lot which will achieve the highest sensitivity in a completed receiver. This receiver is used in systems operating with NRZ data from 140 to 440 Mbit/s. At 1.3 μm and 296 Mbit/s the mean sensitivity achieved was an average optical power \bar{P} = -35.6 dBm for a 10-9bit error rate (BER), with a best value of -36.3 dBm. This receiver is physically robust, being able to withstand stresses well in excess of those encountered in actual use. Preliminary aging data indicate that a long-term failure rate of less than 2.5 in 109device hours can be achieved.

A high reliability high sensitivity lightwave receiver for the SL undersea lightwave system

The active devices in the first Bell System transistorized submarine cable system (sf) are unpassivated, diffused-base, germanium transistors and oxide-passivated, silicon diodes. At the date of this writing these devices have accumulated over 550 million device hours of powered operation in service and on the aging rack without failure or impaired device performance for a demonstrated failure rate of less than 0.00045 percent per thousand hours (4.5 fits) with 90-percent confidence. This paper reports details of the behavior of 500 of these devices that have reached ten years of controlled power aging. The overall results indicate that initial reliability objectives are being achieved and that the semiconductor devices should not be expected to limit the desired life span of sf submarine cables.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/6731005/6768182/06768188.pdf

Ten years of power aging of the same group of submarine cable semiconductor devices

The Bell System initiated development of semiconductor devices for use in broad-band repeatered coaxial submarine-cable telephone systems in the early 1960's. Development of such devices has continued at varying levels of activity to this date. Now, over a decade later, more than five years of successful operational life have elapsed on the first installed system; one transatlantic system is in operation and several more of equal or greater length are in various stages of construction. Laboratory-like life validation tests have been conducted on all the devices for use in these systems, and up to seven years of history have elapsed on groups of 100 devices representative of the five varieties used in the first system. No failures have been observed either in service or in life validation tests, thereby confirming a FIT rate of better than five. Moreover, variables data for the representative samples aged for seven years indicate that the confirmed FIT rate may be extremely conservative. Silicon diodes aged below breakdown are more stable than the life-test system designed to evaluate their reliability. Silicon diodes aged in breakdown show a linear drift in leakage current which is so small that it is not detectable except with an ultrasensitive test system. Germanium transistors evaluated over this same period show that the change in current gain they exhibit will be substantially less than the goal established for them at the inception of development. Silicon transistors being developed for a new higher capacity system show promise of exceeding the stability of the more extensively evaluated germanium devices. These results have broader implications than their relevance to submarine-cable system performance since they indicate that the reliability which has long been considered to be inherent in semiconductor devices not only has been demonstrably achieved in quantitative terms but can be considered to be designable for future system applications.

Reliability of semiconductor devices for submarine-cable systems

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

L.E. Miller

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Reliability of semiconductor devices for submarine-cable systems