SEMICON 2025 Silicon Photonics Summit: Keysight on Accelerating Silicon Photonics into Volume Production

Introduction

Silicon photonics is becoming a key technology for data centers, AI, and communications. Yet between design and actual volume production, the industry still faces a "gap": design tools, validation methods, and production testing are often poorly integrated, leading to low efficiency and higher costs.

At the SEMICON 2025 Silicon Photonics Summit, Keysight emphasized that its mission is "to accelerate silicon photonics into volume production". Through integrated solutions spanning four stages, design, validation, manufacturing, and optimization, it aims to form a closed-loop ecosystem that helps the industry shorten time-to-market and reduce risk.

Content

1. Three Major Challenges: Design, Validation, Manufacturing

Keysight pointed out that silicon photonics must overcome three major hurdles to reach volume production:

1. Design

   • Electronic and photonic design tools have traditionally been separate, making it difficult to handle hybrid electro-optical systems.

   • The lack of integrated tools leads to large gaps between simulation and real-world results.

2. Validation

   • Simulation and measurement often diverge, requiring precise cross-domain (electrical/optical/environmental) measurement.

   • High-speed testing must cover multiple dimensions, including temperature, humidity, wavelength, and timing accuracy.

3. Manufacturing

   • Fiber-to-chip alignment is extremely sensitive; volume production requires automated, high-precision equipment.

   • Current manual or standard probing approaches are too inefficient to support large-scale production.

2. Keysight's Four-Stage Integrated Solution

1. Design

   • Provides an ePDA platform and complete PDKs, supporting automated schematic-to-layout generation.

   • Uses advanced simulation and an FDE solver to account for both electrical and optical effects simultaneously.

2. Validation

   • Provides high-speed, multi-domain measurement tools to ensure simulation results match actual performance.

   • Example: high-speed testing for 400G PAM-8, including eye diagrams and transmission parameters.

3. Production

   • Launched the NX5402A silicon photonics wafer test system, which combines:

     • Automated fiber alignment

     • Multi-channel electro-optical testing

     • Real-time diagnostics (ensuring long-term stability)

   • Reduces test labor and time costs, supporting factory-scale volume production.

4. Optimization

   • Establishes a design-validation-manufacturing-optimization closed loop that feeds measurement data back into the design stage.

   • Uses statistical design and continuous PDK optimization to improve yield and reliability.

3. Keysight's Value Proposition

• Cross-domain integration: electrical + optical + heterogeneous systems, designed and tested together.

• Automated measurement: reduces manual handling errors and supports large-scale production.

• Closed-loop ecosystem: continuous iteration from design to production, accelerating technology adoption.

• Shorter time-to-market: helps companies reduce development risk and speed up commercialization.

Summary

In its SEMICON 2025 talk, Keysight emphasized that silicon photonics is not just a technology, but a complete flow spanning design, validation, and manufacturing.

Through its ePDA platform, advanced simulation tools, high-speed measurement systems, and NX5402A automated wafer testing, Keysight has built a closed-loop ecosystem that ensures every step from design to volume production is tightly connected.

For the industry, Keysight's offering is more than test equipment; it is a key enabler helping silicon photonics cross the volume-production gap.