Fundamentals of Reliability Engineering for Optoelectronic Devices

Level: Introductory Length: 4 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: The course targets a wide range of participants, including students, engineers, and managers and seeks to dispel common misconceptions which pervade the industry. A basic understanding of probability and statistics (high school level) may be helpful, but is not required. Description: Component reliability impacts the bottom line of every supplier and customer in the optics industry. Nevertheless, a solid understanding of the fundamental principles of reliability is often limited to a small team of engineers who are responsible for product reliability for an entire organization. There is tremendous value in expanding this knowledge base to others to ensure that all stakeholders (product engineers, managers, technicians, and even customers) speak a "common language" with respect to the topic of reliability. This course provides a broad foundation in reliability engineering methods applied to lifetest design and data analysis. While the course focuses on the application of reliability engineering to optoelectronic devices, the underlying principles can be applied to any component. Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - identify the primary goals of reliability testing - define a complete reliability specification - differentiate between parametric and non-parametric reliability lifetests - list the models used to describe reliability and select the best for a given population - define a FIT score and explain why it is not a good measure of reliability - estimate reliability model parameters from real data - analyze cases which include insufficient, problematic, and/or uncertain data - compute confidence bounds and explain their importance - differentiate between failure modes and root causes - identify infant mortalities, random failures, and wear-out in the data - compare competing failure modes - analyze cases in which slow degradation is present - state the goal of accelerated lifetesting and identify when it is (and is not) appropriate - list common stresses used in accelerated lifetesting and explain how to treat these quantitatively - differentiate between step-stress and multicell accelerated lifetesting - use accelerated lifetest data to simultaneously extract acceleration parameters and population reliability - relate component reliability to module/system reliability Instructor(s): Paul O. Leisher is a Senior Engineer with the Laser Systems Engineering and Operation Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California. Prior to joining LLNL, Dr. Leisher served as Associate Professor of Physics and Optical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Terre Haute, Indiana) and as the Manager of Advanced Technology at nLight Corporation (Vancouver, Washington). He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Bradley University (Peoria, Illinois) in 2002, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Dr. Leisher’s research interests include the design, fabrication, characterization, and analysis of high power semiconductor lasers and other photonic devices. His past responsibilities included the design and analysis of accelerated lifetests for assessing the reliability of high power diode lasers. He has authored over 200 technical journal articles and conference presentations and served as the principal investigator on 48 funded research projects. Dr. Leisher is a senior member of both SPIE and IEEE. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2020 Course Held: 02 February 2020