Test and Measurement: Keysight acquires design data company Cliosoft

Keysight Technologies has acquired hardware design and intellectual property data management company Cliosoft to bolster its electronic design automation (EDA) portfolio and more tightly tie workflows and data between design and testing.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Keysight said that the transaction will not have material impact on its guidance for the quarter or year.

Keysight described Cliosoft as a “longtime collaborator;” the latter company specializes in managing design process and data management (PDM), including functional IP blocks used in integrated circuits. Keysight said that the acquisition “boosts its intelligent automation software offerings with PDM as an essential component in building the foundation for more productive workflows” and will provide customers with “a much stronger link between design and test.”

“One of our top business priorities is creating digital, connected workflows from design to test that accelerate customers’ digital transformation. We see a tremendous opportunity in the PDM space to leverage Cliosoft’s current capabilities combined with our design-test solutions expertise,” said Niels Faché, VP and GM of Keysight EDA. “Adding PDM solutions to the portfolio is a natural progression of our open EDA interoperability strategy to deliver best-in-class tools and workflows in support of increasingly complicated product development lifecycles. Cliosoft offers proven software tools that enable product teams to perform data analytics and accelerate time to insight. The result of faster insight and greater reuse is improved productivity in the verification phase and shorter overall development cycles.”

“Handling exponential growth in design data and maximizing IP reuse with interoperability across EDA vendor environments is a major challenge as we approach the time of ‘More than Moore’s law’,” said Srinath Anantharaman, CEO of Cliosoft. “Keysight’s broad industry leadership in applications like 5G and 6G communications, automotive, and aerospace and defense, makes Keysight uniquely positioned to realize the promise of connecting design, emulation, and test data in streamlined workflows that speed time-to-market.”

In other company news, Keysight also reported its fiscal first quarter 2023 results this week, reflecting year-over-year revenue growth of 10% to $1.38 billion for the quarter. Profits were $260 million, and the company acquired $125 million of its shares in the backbuy program.

Keysight’s Communications Solutions Group (CSG) reported revenues up 7% year-over-year, which the company said was driven in particular by strength in 5G, OpenRAN, 800G and terabit communications as well as interest in non-terrestrial networks. The company’s Electronic Industrial Solutions Group (EISG) saw revenues spike 19% from the same period a year ago, which Keysight said was “driven by growth in next-generation automotive and energy solutions and general electronics.”

In other test news:

-Test company Rohde & Schwarz has extended its Wi-Fi collaboration with chipmaker Broadcom, with Rohde’s R&S CMP180 radio communication tester now certified for production testing of the latest Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access point chipsets.

Rohde also said this week that at the upcoming MWC Barcelona, it expects to showcase 5G Broadcast and research and development related to integration of artificial intelligence in future 6G systems. R&S said that in a demo with Nvidia, it will be spotlighting the industry’s “first hardware-in-the-loop demonstration of a neural receiver, showing the achievable performance gains when using trained ML models compared to traditional signal processing.”