SC347 - Reliability and Qualification of Fiber-Optic Components
16 Mar 2026
09:00 - 12:00
Short Course Level
Beginner
Short Course Description
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.
Short Course Benefits
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.
Short Course Audience
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.
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Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick Consulting, United States
Robert Herrick, Ph.D. is the owner of Robert Herrick Consulting, where he advises startups on reliability, failure analysis, and qualification for silicon photonics and optoelectronics. Previously, he spent a decade at Intel as Principal Engineer, where he built and led the company’s photonics reliability program, trained specialized teams, and helped commercialize heterogeneous lasers on silicon—work that earned an Intel Achievement Award. He has collaborated with UCSB on groundbreaking research in silicon lasers, authored more than 40 publications, and is a Senior Member of IEEE.