Keysight Technologies today introduces an Electrical-Optical-Electrical (EOE) simulation solution in ADS 2026. Engineers can now simulate electrical-to-optical-to-electrical signal chains within a single design environment. This capability is increasingly important as AI infrastructure and high-performance computing drive demand for faster optical links. This type of analysis is essential for setting architecture and evaluating performance.
By 2029, 87% of hyperscale optical transceivers will operate at 800 Gbps or higher, with 1.6 Tbps and 3.2 Tbps on the horizon. With optical links connecting CPUs, GPUs, and high-speed SerDes interfaces, teams need to model interactions across electrical and optical domains. Legacy simulation workflows handle these separately, requiring results from different tools to be manually stitched together, potentially missing cross-domain effects that impact system performance.
The breakthrough EOE capability in ADS 2026 enables engineers to simulate the complete signal path, from transmitters through optical and photonic circuits to electrical receivers, in a unified workflow. The solution leverages Keysight’s High Speed Digital workflow with Keysight Photonic Designer. By simulating the mixed-domain signal chain before hardware implementation, teams can evaluate electrical and optical design tradeoffs and assess signal integrity against high-speed standards earlier in the design cycle.
Key benefits of the solution include:
- Detect signal integrity issues across electrical and optical domains before prototyping: Simulate high-speed SerDes digital channels and photonics IC behavior together. It catches cross-domain issues that surface only when you model both domains simultaneously.
- Simulate bidirectional optical links as they behave in the real world: Full-duplex optical simulation captures forward and backward signal propagation within an EOE channel. It’s a capability that previous tools could not perform.
- Assess nonlinear effects across multiple wavelengths for multi-lane interconnects: Wavelength division multiplexing support within EOE simulation flows lets engineers evaluate how optical nonlinearities affect performance across wavelengths. This addresses a growing concern as 800G and 1.6T optical links use multiple wavelengths simultaneously on the same waveguide. These modulations in wavelengths and non-linearities model together as a system.
- Obtain a realistic view of system-level signal quality: Noise modeling spans the electrical and optical domains simultaneously, enabling engineers to assess performance under realistic conditions rather than modeling each domain in isolation.
- Catch nonlinear effects before they reach hardware: Modulator bias-dependent and large-signal non-linear effects are visible within end-to-end simulations.
- Make electrical-optical design trade-offs in one workflow: The electrical channel and optical envelope simulators have a patent for multi-domain co-simulation bridges, which eliminates the need to move between separate tools to evaluate trade-offs.
Beyond system-level EOE simulation, ADS 2026 covers the full design flow from system down to component optimization. Through PDK support at the circuit level and Keysight RSoft integration at the component level, engineers get a true representation of photonic IC behavior, with no disconnect between the real chip and system-level simulation.
Niels Fache, Senior Vice President, Keysight, said, “AI infrastructure depends on 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps optical links to move data at scale. At these speeds, electrical and optical performance can no longer be modeled separately. With ADS 2026, engineering teams can now simulate those interactions before committing to silicon.”
