Reliability Determination Methodologies for Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) based devices are rapidly gaining importance as core components in communication, signal processing, sensing, computing and medical diagnostic systems for military and commercial applications. The incorporation of these PIC based devices into Department of Defense (DoD) platforms is being hindered by the lack of information on their reliability. Thus, it has become of critical importance to develop methodologies for PIC reliability prediction, verification and validation. This proposed program will bridge this PIC reliability information gap, primarily as it relates to PICs for defense aerospace applications. The goal is to develop, by the end of Phase II of this program, suitable test methods for PIC reliability analysis and corresponding reliability prediction software tools that can be used for defense aerospace applications and potentially in other military and commercial areas such as fiber optic networks, data centers and infrared sensors. The test methods and software tools will be verified and validated through the Phase II period of performance by selecting appropriate PIC devices for experimental reliability testing. These PICs will be subject to environmental, mechanical and accelerated ageing stress tests followed by root cause analysis of device failure. As a step to achieve these Phase II goals, the proposed plan is to perform preparation and risk reduction tasks in Phase I through a trade study of possible reliability prediction strategies based on current standard practices for microelectronic integrated circuits (ICs), individual photonic components and novel approaches developed in this program. State-of-the-art concepts on reliability physics and reliability modeling/simulation will be incorporated.