Short Courses

*This short course has been cancelled*

Reliability and qualification of photonic components, equipment and systems are two critical requisites for our modern telecommunication infrastructure.  They are usually one of a customer’s early areas of intensive inquiry for a new supplier and, potentially, some of the biggest problems in deployed systems.  An unreliable component or module can bring down entire systems and, in the worst scenario, force recalls costing significantly more than the original investment for both supplier and end user.  

This is the 22nd year of an evolving course that started with reliability and qualification of basic photonic components.  It endeavors to address, at least at a high level, the significant expansion of product types, a maturing yet rapidly expanding technology, a changing business environment and a higher and higher world reliance on photonic telecommunications.  This year, new sections have been added to expand the scope to modules, equipment, and systems.

The course provides a view into the methodologies of reliability and qualification, their place in technology and product development, their mechanics, and an intuitive grasp of both.  It also addresses why qualification is needed, but not adequate to assess reliability and the risk of failure.  The importance of a reliability centric rather than a qualification centric perspective is discussed.  Multiple case studies will be used to illustrate specifics.

This course will:

• Describe the important tools, methodologies, mathematics and benefits of reliability programs.
• List the requirements, tests, benefits and limitations of qualification programs.
• Identify the strategic and tactical differences between qualification testing and reliability modeling.
• Review the multitude of roles, contributions, tools, and functions of a reliability group particularly in the early stage product development.
• Discuss and learn what constitutes a qualification program and get the author’s interpretation of the “letter of the law” for many prevalent standards.
• Show charts comparing different qualification standards.
• Determine why and when reliability testing and modeling needs to be done.
• Describe the limitation of both reliability modeling and qualification testing.
• Explain how to establish appropriate reliability tests and gather meaningful data.
• Compute the reliability of a device using accelerated testing data.
• Identify information on standards, components, reliability software and other reference materials.

This course is intended for a general audience including non-technical persons with no specific background, except an interest in or a need for, knowledge of reliability and qualification of photonic devices. It is meant to impart valuable information to audiences of all levels.

David Maack has recently retired after 12 years at Corning, Inc.  He has started a consulting business focused on early stage development, reliability, failure and root cause analysis, fundamental understanding and qualification of photonic devices and systems.  His photonic experience spans almost 50 years in technical and management positions.  The first half of his career involved RDE&M of fiber, cables, connectors, splitters, WDMs and sensors.  The second half has been in qualification and reliability of fiber, splitters, optical amplifiers, lasers, lithium niobite modulators, wavelockers, detectors, transmitters, receivers, photonic integrated circuits, and even distributed mode (DML) all glass audio loudspeakers.

He is a past chairman of the IEC TC86B Working Group 5 writing standards for passive fiber optic components, has participated in multiple Telcordia GR rewrites, and is the author of numerous papers and courses.  He has bachelor’s degrees in both physics and nuclear science with a master's in business administration.