Reliability and accelerated aging of LiNbO3 integrated optic fiber gyro circuits

This paper describes various reliability and accelerated aging tests that have been performed on LiNbO3 integrated optical FOG circuits fabricated by annealed proton exchange. Fully packaged devices have been temperature cycled 100 times from -65 to 125 C and subjected to 11 Grms random vibration with less than 0.5 dB variation in insertion loss. Potential failure mechanisms of LiNbO3 integrated optical circuits are discussed. Ten devices with passive 3-dB couplers have been aged at 150 C and tested every 1000 hr with little, if any, change in device performance.