1505 Insight

Keysight touts 100% focus on electronic measurement

Jay Alexander
Senior Vice President
Chief Technology Officer
Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies has completed its spinoff from Agilent Technologies, and the process went even more smoothly than expected—despite the hard work related to legal and other issues spanning the 100 countries in which Keysight’s customers are located. That’s according to Jay Alexander, Keysight senior vice president and chief executive officer, in an interview at DesignCon in late January.

Alexander presented a brief history of Keysight’s test and measurement business. 1939 to 1998 represented the storied Hewlett-Packard years. In 1999, Agilent spun off from HP, becoming the world’s premier measurement company. Then came the September 2013 announcement that Agilent would spin off its electronic measurement business, a process completed on Nov. 1, 2014, with Keysight beginning operations as an independent company focused 100% on the electronic measurement industry. The company—employing 9,500 people—generated revenue of $2.9 billion in its fiscal year 2013, with more than 60% coming from outside the United States.

While Keysight’s geographically dispersed customers may present different jurisdictional issues, they are interested in the same technologies. When asked if he sees different trends in different parts of the world, Alexander said, “At a high level, no—the same trends are very interconnected, particularly in electronics.” Emphasis might differ on rates of pickup for wireless technologies, for example, with LTE more built out in the west than in the rest of the world, he said, but there is still a huge need for 4G innovation worldwide before the advent of 5G. In addition, he said, there is widespread interest among customers worldwide in energy and renewables.

During the HP years, the company initiated the High Speed Digital Design Symposium, which was later called the HP Digital Design Symposium and has since evolved into the independently managed DesignCon, in which Keysight remains a significant player. “It continues to be a vibrant and relevant show,” Alexander said. It also provided the opportunity for Keysight to highlight its products that address high-speed digital test, including the N1930B Physical Layer Test System (PLTS) 2015 software, the U4154B 4-Gb/s state-mode high-performance logic analyzer module for DDR2/3/4 and LPDDR/2/3/4 protocol validation and debug, the DDR Bus Simulator and DDR4 Compliance Test Bench, the M8195A 65-GS/s arbitrary waveform generator, and the M9375A single-slot PXI vector network analyzer (VNA). This last product, he said, is made possible by Keysight’s measurement science capabilities as embodied in the company’s ASIC technology. In addition, Keysight highlighted new functionality for the J-BERT M8020A high-performance BERT.1

Keysight, Alexander said, will focus on opportunities with above-market growth rates, including wireless communications, an area characterized by explosive mobile data growth and evolving wireless standards. Wireless communications, he said, represent a convergence of high-speed digital and wireless domains.

And, he said, the company will continue to leverage feature-rich benchtop instrument capabilities into modular instruments, such as the M9375A single-slot PXI VNA and the M8195A AXIe AWG. Keysight, he said, is the only company to provide leading-edge measurement technology in the customer’s form factor of choice—including portable instrumentation, as evidenced by the FieldFox handheld analyzer family.

In addition, Alexander said, Keysight will focus on software solutions that link the simulated world with the real world as measured by the company’s instrumentation—thereby helping to solve the simulation-measurement correlation challenge. The company’s simulation, debug, performance-validation, and compliance software, he said, enables “downloadable expertise.”

Since DesignCon, Keysight has launched a variety of products, ranging from voltmeters to optical instrumentation. The Truevolt Series DMMs now include the new 34465A and 34470A, which offer 6½- and 7½-digit resolution, respectively, and provide graphical capabilities to help engineers achieve insights faster.

At the other end of the spectrum, the company introduced the 81606A tunable laser source, a new module for the 8164B lightwave measurement system. Tunable lasers, in combination with optical power meters and a polarization controller, measure the filter slope, isolation, polarization dependence, insertion loss, and reflectivity of multiplexers/demultiplexers, channel interleavers, and wavelength-selective switches used in reconfigurable optical fiber networks.

In the RF/microwave space, the company debuted the E5080A ENA VNA, which shares the Keysight PNA- and PXI-Series software architecture, making it easy for engineers to take measurements across multiple Keysight VNAs. For time-domain measurements, the company introduced the Infiniium V-Series oscilloscopes with models that range from 8 GHz to 33 GHz. And in yet another measurement application area, the company launched the IntegraVision power analyzer, which combines power measurements and touch-driven oscilloscope visualization capability in a single instrument. The IntegraVision borrows technology from Keysight’s InfiniiVision 6000 X-Series oscilloscope, including its 12.1-inch multitouch capacitive touchscreen display.

Touchscreen interfaces are becoming common on instruments, and Alexander said at DesignCon that such features draw tremendously positive feedback. In fact, he pointed out, Keysight has gone beyond the touchscreen to provide voice input in its InfiniiVision 6000 X-Series scopes.

Nevertheless, he said, “we will preserve the knobs and buttons for the most important functions.”

Reference
1. Nelson, R., “DesignCon highlights all things high-speed-digital,EE-Evaluation Engineering, April 2015, p. 9.

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