8 March 2011

NeoPhotonics’ PIC products surpass 3bn operating hours without field failure

NeoPhotonics Corp of San Jose, CA, USA says that its photonic integrated circuit (PIC) products have accumulated more than 3 billion hours of operation without a reported field failure.

NeoPhotonics is a vertically integrated designer and manufacturer of PIC-based modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks. The firm has ISO 9001:2000 certified engineering and manufacturing facilities in both Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, China.

Since 2003, the firm has shipped more than 240,000 PIC modules for deployment in telecoms networks worldwide, including thermally stabilized arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs), athermal AWGs, coherent mixers for 40 and 100Gbps coherent systems, and splitters for FTTH PON networks. Together, these products have operated in the field for more than 3 billion hours. Without reported field failures, the upper limit on the FIT rate of NeoPhotonics’ PIC products is 0.3. A FIT rate of 1 represents one failure in 1 billion hours of operation.

“Reliability has been one of the most important characteristics of our products, and our design for reliability starts with the beginning of product development,” says CEO & chairman Tim Jenks. “With the accelerating deployment of 100Gbps data transmission, a single 40-channel AWG deployed several years ago may soon be carrying a few trillion bits of information every second. At those data transmission volumes, a single point of failure in a network could disrupt tens of millions of individual phone calls and other data flows, and our customers look to NeoPhotonics to provide the reliability necessary to minimize the risks of these types of field failures,” he adds.

“NeoPhotonics designs is products for reliability by subjecting design elements to highly accelerated stress testing (HAST), carrying out Telcordia qualification testing its products, and conducting ongoing reliability testing (ORT) on production samples during the product’s life cycle,” says Dr Wupen Yuen, VP of R&D. “Because our PIC products integrate many functions into a single optical chip, thereby eliminating many interconnection and packaging elements, we believe we are able to achieve much higher product reliability than is possible with comparable products made of non-PIC discrete components.”

NeoPhotonics is showcasing its products in booth 1025 at this week’s Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC 2011) in Los Angeles (8–10 March).

Tags: NeoPhotonics PICs

Visit: www.neophotonics.com

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