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

This paper investigates the system reliability for 155 Mb/s optical transmi tters by deriving a system reliability function from reliability data of ea ch component for transmitters, laser diode, photodiode, optical assembly, a nd 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 o btained from a probability plotting method. From the system reliability fun ction, the MTTF of the optical transmitter at 65 degrees C was estimated to be 47 000 h with 95% confidence. In this estimation, we introduced modifie d lifetime of laser diodes and reliability function of optical assembly.