Keysight Technologies and WIN Semiconductors Launch New GaN MMIC Design Workflow
Keysight Technologies Inc. saw its stock price drop as it hit a 20-day low amid a broader market decline, with the Nasdaq-100 down 1.64% and the S&P 500 down 0.33%.
The decline in stock price occurred despite the announcement of a joint GaN MMIC design workflow with WIN Semiconductors, which aims to reduce fabrication risks for 5G applications. This innovative workflow integrates multi-domain simulation and 3D layout, enhancing customer confidence and accelerating time-to-market for new products. The global GaN RF device market is projected to reach $2.77 billion by 2031, highlighting the significance of this development.
This collaboration positions Keysight favorably in a growing market, but the current stock decline reflects broader market pressures rather than the potential benefits of the new workflow.
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- Workflow Innovation: The joint GaN MMIC design workflow from Keysight Technologies and WIN Semiconductors integrates multi-domain simulation, 3D layout, and evaluation board design, ensuring first-pass tapeout success and significantly reducing fabrication risks.
- Market Demand Drivers: With the global GaN RF device market projected to reach $2.77 billion by 2031, MMIC design houses that cannot demonstrate performance on evaluation boards risk losing market share, underscoring the importance of the new workflow.
- Efficiency Through Automation: The new workflow automates all simulation, optimization, and verification steps required for MMIC design, ensuring no analysis is skipped before submission to the foundry, thereby accelerating time-to-market for new products.
- Enhanced Customer Confidence: The combination of WIN's NP 120P GaN Process Design Kit with Keysight's simulation tools allows design houses to prove full system performance before fabrication, boosting customer confidence in advanced RF products and facilitating their market launch.
- Acquisition Completed: Keysight Technologies completed its acquisition of VPIphotonics on June 9, 2026, integrating system-level simulation into its photonic design automation portfolio, significantly enhancing design capabilities from components to complete links to meet the growing demand in silicon photonics and co-packaged optics markets.
- Workflow Integration: With the VPIphotonics Design Suite, Keysight's photonic design automation now spans from device physics to full system behavior, enabling engineers to simulate the entire transceiver path in a single environment, thereby reducing errors and delays associated with design handoffs.
- Growing Market Demand: As demand for photonic design surges in data center and AI infrastructure markets, Keysight's acquisition positions it to offer robust workflow solutions that address design complexities for customers operating at speeds exceeding 1 THz, enhancing its competitive edge.
- Team Synergy: The integration of the VPIphotonics team will further solidify Keysight's leadership in photonic design, allowing both companies to collaboratively develop efficient design tools that better address critical challenges in photonic design, driving technological innovation.
- Partnership Announcement: Keysight Technologies has joined the Siemens Digital Industries Software Technology Partner Program, enabling customers to utilize the AI-driven Eggplant Test for validating digital engineering and product lifecycle management (PLM) environments, thereby enhancing testing efficiency and accuracy.
- Market Demand: Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to shorten development cycles, particularly as software-driven products become more complex, rendering traditional manual testing processes inadequate for scalable needs and leading to operational inefficiencies.
- Solution Benefits: Through this partnership, customers using Teamcenter® software can leverage Keysight Eggplant Test to validate enterprise applications and engineering workflows before production, significantly reducing the risk of undetected issues and ensuring system performance and reliability.
- Strategic Importance: Gareth Smith, General Manager of Software Quality Engineering at Keysight, emphasized that as PLM environments grow in complexity, organizations require a reliable AI-driven solution to validate software, ensuring system stability and performance at every stage of the product lifecycle.
- Circuit Design Optimization: Keysight Technologies announced support for GlobalFoundries' silicon photonics process technology in its Advanced Design System (ADS) Photonic Designer, enabling designers to transition from photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design to full electro-optical-electrical (EOE) system simulation within a single environment, thereby enhancing design efficiency and reducing development risks.
- Simplified Performance Validation: By connecting PIC design with system-level EOE simulation, engineers can validate photonic circuit optical link behavior, including eye diagram analysis and signal integrity metrics, without switching tools, ensuring that designs meet expected performance before production.
- Accelerated Development Cycle: Keysight's physics-based models aligned with GF's silicon photonics process are ready for immediate use, allowing teams to start working without the need to build or calibrate component libraries from scratch, thus shortening time to first design and improving market responsiveness.
- Early System-Level Insights: By evaluating how PIC performance affects optical link early in architecture development, engineers can reduce design iterations and accelerate time to market, further enhancing the company's competitiveness in high-speed optical interconnect architecture development.
- Enhanced Signal Capture: The Pro XA6 SA6320A signal analyzer from Keysight features an analysis bandwidth of up to 8 GHz, enabling broader signal capture that simplifies workflows and accelerates the design and validation of wireless systems.
- Support for High-Frequency Design: With frequency coverage extending to 67 GHz, this device is tailored for next-generation wireless, millimeter-wave, and radar applications, significantly improving signal clarity and measurement accuracy, thus aiding engineers in quickly identifying signal impairments.
- Accelerated 5G NR Analysis: The GPU-accelerated demodulation speeds of the Pro XA6 SA6320A shorten the analysis time for wideband 5G NR error vector magnitude (EVM) measurements, enhancing the efficiency of engineering teams.
- Streamlined Validation Processes: The Expert XA5 SA6210A signal analyzer employs a dual-receiver architecture to support 5G NR and WLAN MIMO measurements, enabling faster single-instrument analysis of complex RF interactions, thereby increasing measurement confidence.
- Collaboration Background: Keysight Technologies is collaborating with NTT DOCOMO and NTT under a memorandum of understanding to accelerate the development of 6G wireless communication design, testing, and measurement technologies, enhancing the evaluation and validation of next-generation wireless architectures.
- Technical Progress: The companies have made initial strides in measurement-driven channel modeling and distributed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) simulation, enabling researchers to evaluate wireless system performance in complex environments with greater confidence.
- Realistic Simulation: Keysight and DOCOMO are refining channel models using real-world radio propagation measurements to better simulate complex wireless conditions in laboratory settings, thereby improving the repeatability and scalability of 6G architecture evaluations.
- Industry Impact: This collaboration not only helps reduce the risks associated with transitioning from research to deployment but also provides a more reliable validation foundation for innovation within the 6G ecosystem, with initial results expected to be presented at the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2026 in Malaga, Spain.






