NeoPhotonics photonic IC (PIC) products surpass 3 billion operating hours without a reported field failure

LOS ANGELES, USA: NeoPhotonics Corp., a leading designer and manufacturer of photonic integrated circuit, or PIC, based modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high speed communications networks, has announced its PIC products had accumulated more than 3 billion hours of operation without a reported field failure.

Since 2003, NeoPhotonics has shipped more than 240,000 PIC modules for deployment in telecommunications networks around the world, including thermally stabilized 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 a billion hours of operation.

“For NeoPhotonics, reliability has been one of the most important characteristics of our products and our design for reliability starts with the beginning of product development,” said Tim Jenks, CEO and chairman of NeoPhotonics. “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.”

“NeoPhotonics designs is products for reliability by subjecting design elements to Highly Accelerated Stress Testing, or HAST, carrying out Telcordia qualification testing its products, and conducting Ongoing Reliability Testing, or ORT, on production samples during the product’s life cycle,” said Dr. Wupen Yuen, VP of Research and Development of NeoPhotonics. “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.”