Manufacturability and reliability on 10-Gb/s transponder for ethernet-based applications

In this paper, manufacturing issues include Optical Sub-Assembly (OSA), Electrical Sub-Assembly (ESA) and reliability considerations of 10 Gb/s Ethernet transponder were studied by using experiments and implementation. In the growing optical communication industry, one of the star products is the Z-axis pluggable optical transceiver module. Under the broad usage of Ethernet means high port density, low cost, high utilities, compact size and still require excellent performance. After standardizing of 10 Gb/s ethernet (IEEE 802.3ae), many transceiver companies, silicon vendors and system vendors reached the agreement and signed up diversity of MSA (Multi-Source Agreement). These MSAs still keep modifying with system demands, customer requirements, cost and performance issue. This paper presents how to achieve these functions description in the MSA and own a highly manufacturability and reliability module design. According to composed block of transponder, we split it into OSA, ESA, mechanical design and related reliability experimental result. In the OSA, traditional TO-CAN package and optical components be introduced. Because the mature manufacture experience, vendor can easy to meet low cost and manufacturability requirements and only need to slightly modifications. A simply solution be implemented to solve this problem and discuss the critical point of the design. Thermal issue on OSA will also be mentioned because of the sensitive of light source and how to calculate the effect to find effective solutions. By the way, some manufacturability criteria will be discussed for OSA characteristics in 10 Gb/s applications. In the ESA, PMD (Physical media dependant) driving methods, Multi-Source Agreement related digital optical monitor function implement and performance comparison will be presented. On the other hand, we will examine the crosstalk effect between transmitter and receiver circuit and impact to the module Optical to Electrical convert interface design. We still need to take well-assembly between OSA and ESA into consideration. Perfect assembly will lead us to earn wonderful reliability and manufacturability. In the mechanical design, many reliability and maufacturability issue need to consider such as thermal, EMI, temperature, humidity effect etc. So, module mechanical design must be highly collocation with ESA, OSA, heat spreader and special EMI shielding design. Experimental data and thermal simulation result are also prepared to guide us forward to a successful product.