The reliability program provides enhanced reliability and is implemented as an integral part of the Alcatel-Lucent Product Life Cycle (PLC) process. The reliability program is comprehensive, and includes activities such as setting and ensuring compliance with customer-focused system-reliability requirements, ensuring component qualification is consistent with use environment and system design, assuring satisfactory component-attachment reliability, predicting failure rates of Field Replaceable Units (FRUs), making sparing recommendations, assessing reliability architecture, modeling system reliability, assuring satisfactory system-downtime performance, reducing hardware failure rates through Environmental Stress Testing (EST), and tracking field returns.
During the design and development stage, reliability predictions, qualification and selection of components, definition of quality assurance audit standards, and prototyping of critical areas of the system ensure built-in reliability.
During manufacturing and field deployment, techniques such as environmental stress testing, production quality audits, field-return tracking, failure-mode analysis, and feedback and corrective-action further enhance the ongoing reliability improvement efforts on the Alcatel-Lucent 1665 DMXtend.
Alcatel-Lucent 1665 DMXtend circuit packs are subjected to an Environmental Stress Testing (EST) program. The purpose of the program is to improve reliability by reducing early life failures and implementing root-cause analysis and corrective action on circuit packs that fail EST.
Alcatel-Lucent 1665 DMXtend satisfies a stringent set of reliability specifications. Some of the critical specifications include Telcordia ® downtime requirements for multiplexers. Telcordia ® requirements state that the downtime of a two-way channel within a SONET multiplexer, due to hardware failure, must be less than 1.75 minutes per year in a Central Office (CO) environment and 5.25 minutes per year in a Outside Plant (OSP) environment. These requirements appear in Telcordia ® GR-418-CORE.
These requirements apply to all system elements needed to process a two-way channel, including the core system as well as the high-speed and low-speed interfaces. System-reliability analysis employing Markov modeling is used to determine the system downtimes. As specified in Telcordia ® GR-418-CORE, this analysis assumes a mean time to repair of 2 hours for the CO environment and 4 hours for the OSP environment. Individual Field Replacable Unit (FRU) failure rates used in the model were determined using the method described in Telcordia ® SR-332, Reliability Prediction Procedure for Electronic Equipment (RPP). FRUs are system elements that can be replaced in the field, including items such as circuit packs, removable optical interfaces, housings, cooling units, and removable LEDs.
| September 2013 | Copyright © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent. All rights reserved. |