Keysight EDA update at DAC 2026

On the last day of #DAC2026 I stopped by the Keysight booth to chat with Nilesh Kamdar, GM of EDA Business to get an update. He has spent 27 years in the industry, and this made 25 DAC trips for him. For Keysight the application areas of focus are serving designers of high frequency and high-speed digital, RF, and mm/uwave designs. An example customer would be designing communication chips at 10GHz or 100Gbps. One new area in 2026 is EDA software for quantum design.

In multi-physics, Keysight EDA acquired ESI Group two years ago, and their technology is now used to model digital twins of automobiles for crash simulations, where detailed mechanical analysis is required. Multi-physics also applies in electronics where mechanical stress is caused by thermal effects, which impact failure rates and aging, critical for analysis of advanced IC packaging.

One customer had an RF chip that radiated power, became hotter, but then the efficiency decreased with the higher heating. They used Keysight MultiPhysics solutions (thermal, electrical and CFD) to push fluid through micro-vias in the interposer, cooling the device and providing a 10dB performance improvement.

Another multi-physics offering is silicon photonics design where they’ve done in-house development, plus they acquired the optical systems group from Synopsys one year ago. Electronic Photonic Design Automation (EPDA) software helps teams design Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) for end-to-end electro-optical co-design of optical interconnects, like: Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO), Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), On-Board Optics (OBO), and Near-Package Optics (NPO). With Keysight, engineers can analyze the complete Photonics chain in design software, then perform measurements after production.

Optical communication like satellite to satellite, or satellite to earth with lasers can now be simulated. Data centers are using optical communications for higher speeds than copper switching. VPIPhotonics is the product family for optical systems and communication design and then integrate with the ADS Photonic Designer and Rsoft to connect physics-based device simulation with PIC design. Computationally heavy calculations for light propagation use Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) methods, which can be accelerated by using NVIDIA GPUs.

On the AI front there is a natural language assistant for the Keysight ADS software, helping RF and high-speed users become more productive. Their EDA Learning Assistant is a generative AI chat feature providing context-aware answers that were trained on ADS product documentation. Finally, ADS 2027 connects to any AI/ML modeling framework by supporting MCP servers enabling multi-agent tasks. One can use and foundational AI model, and if needed can also use open source models to help keep your token costs low. ADS 2027 also has in-depth surrogate model creation and usage for fast design turnarounds.

For data and IP management there’s the Cliosoft tools, called SOS, and they help AI-powered workflows to maintain clean, connected and contextualized data. Expect a new release called SOS.AI by the end of the year, stay tuned for details.

During DAC, it was announced that the RFPro electromagnetic (EM) design software was certified for the Intel 14A and Intel 18A-P process nodes. RFIC designers and mixed-signal designers can accurately simulate their Intel designs and optimize them before production. Last year Keysight announced that they support the EMIB-T silicon bridge packaging technology of Intel to support chiplet-based designs.

The newly acquired PowerArtist product from Synopsys does power estimation at the RTL stage and was shown at DAC with new features like: real application activity profiling, upgraded parallel processing , advanced AI based power analysis reporting, and physically-aware RTL modeling.

Summary

Keysight EDA was quite involved with DAC 2026 in their exhibit area, poster session, two panels, joint papers with customers, people on the technical committees and sponsoring the I Love DAC program. It was a pleasure to meet with Nilesh Kamdar to get an update and big picture this year and I look forward to seeing their progress over the next year.

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