Reliability of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser arrays with redundancy

Abstract

This paper describes theoretical reliability analysis of a system containing n optical ports in which each optical port contains m redundant vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. We study the wearout failure statistics, modelled with lognormal distribution, for three different chip-level integration approaches: (A) each laser on its own chip, resulting in m·n chips, (B) m redundant lasers associated with one channel are on a single chip, resulting in n chips, and (C) all m·n lasers integrated on a single chip. We present a model that includes the run-to-run reliability parameter fluctuation and find that the three integration schemes consistently exhibit MTTF(C) ≥ MTTF(A) ≥ MTTF(B) for lognormal distribution shape parameters observed in commercial vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. We also provide analytic approximations for the failure statistics for all three integration approaches enabling straightforward calculation of the failure statistics for any redundancy and channel number.

Keywords

• vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser arrays
• integration
• reliability
• redundancy
• failure statistics