Estimation of system reliability for uncooled optical transmitters using system reliability function

This paper investigates the system reliability for 155 Mb/s optical transmitters by deriving a system reliability function from reliability data of each component for transmitters, laser diode, photodiode, optical assembly, and driver IC. The reliability data for each component reliability function have been obtained from accelerated aging test. The reliability parameters such as failure rate, mean time-to-failure (MTTF), standard deviation are obtained from a probability plotting method. From the system reliability function, the MTTF of the optical transmitter at 65/spl deg/C was estimated to be 47000 h with 95% confidence. In this estimation, we introduced modified lifetime of laser diodes and reliability function of optical assembly.