Reliability of optical connectors - Humidity behavior of the adhesive

Reliability test results on optical connectors are in poor agreement with field observation based on more than 20 years of experience. In this work, we will first present the most important failure mechanisms of optical connectors observed in the field and discuss them in detail. The overall FIT-rate of an optical connector can be obtained from the sum of the FIT-rates of the different failure mechanism. None of these mechanisms is showing any wear-out behavior according to the published field observations. Acceleration test for connectors described in the standards use temperature and humidity as acceleration parameter. We will present test results on both high temperature and high humidity tests and analyze the data. The analysis of these data shows that humidity has a particularly destructive effect on optical connectors which is never observed in the field. The humidity data will be analyzed based on additional measurement performed on the effect of humidity on the epoxy adhesive. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.