Completing Keysight's End-to-End Photonic Design Workflow

As demand for AI infrastructure, cloud computing, and next-generation optical networks continues to accelerate, photonics engineers face a growing challenge: managing complexity across every stage of the design process.

From photonic devices and integrated circuits to transceivers, optical links, and network architectures, today's designs span multiple domains and levels of abstraction. Yet many engineering teams still rely on disconnected tools and workflows, creating inefficiencies, introducing risk, and making it difficult to predict how a design will perform in the real world.

Keysight has taken an important step toward solving this challenge by extending its photonic design automation portfolio from device-level simulation to complete system-level validation. The result is a more comprehensive workflow that enables engineers to move from component design to full optical system analysis within a connected environment.

The Need for End-to-End Photonic Design

As optical systems become more sophisticated, design decisions made at the component level can have significant consequences at the system level.

A high-performance modulator, laser, or photonic integrated circuit may meet its individual specifications, but how will it behave when integrated into a complete transceiver? How will signal impairments accumulate over hundreds of kilometers of fiber? How will network dynamics, power transients, or digital signal processing algorithms affect overall link performance?

Answering these questions requires visibility across the entire photonics stack.

Traditionally, engineers have addressed these challenges by moving designs between multiple specialized tools, often requiring manual data transfers and repeated validation efforts. This fragmented approach can slow development cycles and increase the likelihood of costly surprises during prototyping and testing.

Building a Complete Photonics Design Stack

Keysight has long provided industry-leading solutions for photonic and high-speed electronic design.

At the device level, RSoft Photonic Device Tools enables engineers to model and optimize critical photonic components such as waveguides, gratings, lasers, and modulators. At the circuit level, ADS Photonic Designer supports the design and verification of photonic integrated circuits (PICs), helping teams develop increasingly complex integrated photonic systems.

The addition of VPIphotonics extends this workflow to the system level.

VPIphotonics Design Suite enables engineers to simulate complete optical transmission systems, subsystems, and networks using realistic models and advanced signal representations. Whether evaluating a short-reach data center interconnect, a coherent terabit transceiver, a metro network, or an ultra-long-haul submarine link, engineers can analyze performance before committing to hardware development.

Together, these capabilities create a design journey that spans from device physics to system behavior.

From Electrical to Optical and Back Again

One of the most powerful aspects of the combined workflow is the ability to evaluate complete electrical-optical-electrical (E-O-E) signal paths.

Through integration with Keysight’s Advanced Design System (ADS), VPI Optical Link enables engineers to simulate an entire transceiver chain within a unified environment. Within this workflow, Photonic Designer (ADS) uniquely supports today a patent-protected E-O-E workflow, helping bridge photonic circuit design with system-level validation. Signals can be traced from high-speed electrical circuitry through optical conversion, transmission across fiber, and back into the electrical domain for analysis.

This approach allows teams to predict key performance metrics such as bit error rate (BER), eye diagrams, error vector magnitude (EVM), and signal integrity earlier in the design process.

Rather than validating isolated sections of a design, engineers gain visibility into how the entire system behaves under realistic operating conditions.

Simulating Real-World Optical Systems

The value of system-level simulation extends well beyond individual links.

VPIphotonics supports the design and analysis of complex wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) systems, coherent optical transmission technologies, free-space optical communications, radio-over-fiber architectures, and advanced networking scenarios.

Its extensive library of photonic and electronic modules enables engineers to investigate critical design factors including laser chirp, amplifier noise, filtering effects, path loss, and nonlinear fiber impairments.

Advanced fiber models account for real-world phenomena such as Kerr nonlinearities, Raman scattering, Brillouin scattering, Rayleigh effects, and polarization interactions, helping teams better predict deployed system performance.

Engineers can also evaluate network dynamics, analyze power transients in reconfigurable optical networks, test impairment-aware routing strategies, and assess technology upgrade scenarios before making infrastructure investments.

Accelerating Innovation in the AI Era

The timing of this expanded workflow is particularly significant.

The rapid growth of AI infrastructure is driving unprecedented demand for high-capacity optical interconnects, silicon photonics, and co-packaged optics. As data rates move toward and beyond the terabit-per-second range, interactions between electrical, optical, and system-level behaviors become increasingly important.

Engineering teams need tools that allow them to understand these interactions without introducing workflow bottlenecks.

By bringing together device, circuit, and system-level simulation, the Keysight photonics stack will help engineers evaluate designs across multiple domains while maintaining consistency throughout the development process.

This can lead to earlier identification of performance issues, fewer prototype iterations, improved correlation with laboratory measurements, and faster time-to-market.

Completing the Vision

Photonics innovation depends on understanding how individual design decisions influence overall system performance. As designs become more complex, engineers need a unified workflow that connects device optimization, PIC development, and system-level validation.

The strategic combination of Photonic Designer within Keysight ADS, RSoft, and VPIphotonics brings together these capabilities in a single photonics design environment. RSoft enables advanced device-level simulation and optimization of key components such as waveguides, gratings, lasers, and modulators. Photonic Designer extends this into photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design and verification, while VPIphotonics adds system-level simulation for complete optical links and network architectures.

Together, these technologies enable an end-to-end photonics workflow—from system design down to component optimization—allowing engineers to generate and validate optical, electro-optical (EO), and opto-electrical (OE) designs with greater speed, precision, and confidence.

By connecting device physics, circuit design, and real-world system performance, Keysight helps engineering teams identify challenges earlier, reduce design iterations, and accelerate the development of next-generation optical technologies.

Find out more: Keysight Expands Photonic Design Automation Portfolio with System-Level Simulation

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