What Electrical-Optical-Electrical Simulation Brings to High-Speed Links
Electrical-Optical-Electrical (EOE) simulation software is a design environment that models full signal paths from electrical transmitters through optical or photonic circuits back into electrical receivers, allowing engineers to evaluate signal integrity, noise, and nonlinear effects across electrical and optical domains in a single workflow. Keysight’s introduction of EOE simulation in ADS 2026 reflects pressure on designers building AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and advanced data center links, where electrical SerDes and photonics IC design can no longer be treated as separate tasks. According to engineering.com, by 2029 an estimated 87% of hyperscale optical transceivers are expected to operate at 800 Gbps or higher, with 1.6 Tbps and 3.2 Tbps links also emerging. This trend makes unified electrical optical simulation essential for understanding how channel decisions, modulation formats, and optical components interact before hardware is built.
ADS 2026 Features: Unified EOE Workflow for SerDes and Photonics
The new ADS 2026 features center on a tightly integrated EOE workflow that joins Keysight’s High Speed Digital tools with Keysight Photonic Designer. Instead of exporting channel results to a separate photonics tool and manually stitching simulations together, SerDes design tools and photonics IC design models now share a single environment. Engineers can build an end-of-eye (EOE) channel model that spans transmit drivers, electrical channels, optical modulators, photonic waveguides, and electrical receivers. Bidirectional optical links can be simulated in one setup, so forward and backward propagation effects are visible together. Noise and distortion are modeled coherently across the chain, including modulator bias dependence and large-signal nonlinear behavior. This unified electrical optical simulation flow lets teams test different architectures, such as lane counts or modulation schemes, and quickly see system-level eye diagrams and penalties without switching tools.
Shorter Design Cycles and Fewer Integration Errors
Legacy workflows for hybrid electrical-optical systems often involve separate simulations for SerDes channels and photonics ICs, followed by manual transfer of results. That approach is slow and can hide cross-domain issues, especially when different teams handle different tools. With EOE simulation software inside ADS 2026, those handoffs are replaced by a single co-simulation where electrical channel models and optical envelope simulations run together. Engineers can detect signal integrity problems that appear only when both domains are modeled simultaneously, such as nonlinear interactions between driver equalization and optical modulators or wavelength-dependent penalties in multi-lane links. End-to-end modeling of noise and nonlinearities means fewer surprises during lab bring-up, reducing the number of design spins. By supporting work from system concepts down to circuit-level PDKs and component-level models, ADS 2026 reduces integration risk across the entire design flow.
Supporting Multi-Wavelength and Future High-Capacity Links
Multi-wavelength designs are becoming standard as bandwidth pushes into the 800G, 1.6T, and beyond range, and ADS 2026 targets this reality directly. The EOE simulation capability supports links that use wavelength division multiplexing, so designers can examine how nonlinear optical effects behave across multiple wavelengths in the same system. Full-duplex optical links can be modeled as a single EOE channel, capturing both directions of traffic and their mutual impact on performance. Engineers can explore tradeoffs such as lane count, symbol rate, and wavelength spacing while directly observing their influence on eye closures and bit error tendencies. Since photonics IC design, SerDes design tools, and system-level EOE models share a common environment, development teams can move from architecture evaluation to detailed implementation without shifting platforms, making ADS 2026 a practical electrical optical simulation solution for next-generation high-speed interconnects and photonics-rich systems.