Judy Warner (00:01) Hi Roberto, thanks so much for joining us this week as part of our DesignCon tailgate party. I'm excited to talk to you about technology trends and what you're up to this day. So why don't you start by introducing yourself and telling us a little about what you're observing in the technology trends you're tracking as we go into the Super Bowl of electronics at DesignCon. Roberto Piacentini Filho (00:24) Yeah, this is great. So hello everyone, my name is Roberto. I've been in the test measurement automation space for over 25 years. And at Keysight, I drive the marketing teams for our EVA software platforms. Judy Warner (00:40) So that's ADS, Pro, all those products. So what's the theme of the trends, you know, as you develop both software and hardware, simulation and test and measurement? Like, what are the things you're tracking? I know I just got done with big AI series and it seems like everybody's talking about that right now. Roberto Piacentini Filho (00:43) ADS, that's correct. All of those products, yes. Yeah, you stole my thunder. Yeah, AI. AI is the big thing that we are tracking. And I am so excited. I guess we all arrived with the chat TTPs of the world, Google's Gemini, all of these things. AI is invading our lives in ways that you never imagined, right? So we wouldn't be different. So we are tracking AI. one of the key things and key things that we are trying to bring this year into this icon. is empowering AI innovation. That's going to be our main theme for this show. Judy Warner (01:40) So when you say empowering innovation, you mean innovation particularly with hardware using your software, but to scale up with those technologies. Roberto Piacentini Filho (01:52) Well, is a good point, right? Because yeah, you're right. Empowering AI innovation, we've to dive a little deeper into this. So one of the things that I want to touch base on is that I mentioned that AI is all around us, right? And the more we use AI, we need to look at the back-end systems that are kind of empowering AI. So empowering AI innovation, mean, how fast can we scale up AI? And there's a couple of challenges that are associated with us scaling up AI and fueling at the same time the innovation in that space. Judy Warner (02:34) Okay, I was just trying to put it in context of our audience, right? Which that we share in many ways, right? And how that relates to the work they're facing now and what they're gonna face in the new year and ways that you're hopefully empowering them and giving them some tools to do that. So tell me some of the existing problems that exist particularly for enabling AI like... What does it look like where the rubber meets the road? know a lot of people have talked to me about data centers and there's a whole ecosystem there. So what are the pieces you're tracking Roberto? Roberto Piacentini Filho (03:09) Yeah, good. This is a good question. oops. I have to restart. My computer just decided to restart, but my screen just locked. Sorry. We're at this part, right? I have to keep moving my mouse, otherwise my computer will lock. Can you ask the question again? Judy Warner (03:21) That's okay. No problem. Yep. What does that look like practically as far as AI goes? You know, there's many pieces. It's really a whole ecosystem. So as someone that's been in this space for decades and someone leading a team that's trying to help build this practical thing that helps engineers, you know, across the entire system, what does that mean practically? What are the specific things? that you're overseeing or that are happening at Keysight to help us move forward and innovate with success at the design engineering level specifically. Roberto Piacentini Filho (04:07) Yes, exactly. So I mentioned in the beginning scaling up AI, right? So then let's think a little bit about what do I mean by scaling up AI? Thinking about what is behind the scenes, the backends running the AI for us. We have servers. then scaling up AI means faster servers. And faster servers, more specifically to design, it means memory, adopting the latest memory standards. Interconnects, we have PCIe, we have chipless interconnects, a bunch of new technical USB, and so forth. There's also some need for flexible modularity, right? You have the servers, you'll have this faster service. But then what happens when you need more servers? You want to have a fast way to just add more server compute units as needed. And then the other aspect that I think is important to point out for our listeners is faster multi-site connectivity, right? You're not going to have a single data center serving out the AI applications for the entire world. You're going to have this multiple data centers across different continents, sometimes the same continent, and they have to communicate with each other. And then communicating with each other means faster networking, getting into photonics networking and so forth. So this is what I mean by scaling up AI that I think it's important to consider. And then when it comes into the designers that are building the systems for us, how do we achieve the AI scale up, right? In my mind, achieving AI scale up, from designer's perspective, it means that you are using the right tools for the jobs to be done, for the things that you're trying to do. So then if you are a circuit design engineer, you want to have the best in class solution for simulating your prototypes before, well, simulating your designs before actually creating prototypes. And then when you have the first prototypes, how do you correlate the simulation with the measures and so forth? So then for you to scale up AI and be pro... effective on your role as a designer, you need to have tools that make the design workflow operate better, more efficiently, not just in a silo like I'm just simulating software. It has to go from concept, simulation, prototyping, all the way to the first manufacturing article. And you need to select tools that throughout this flow, they are communicating and sharing insights. throughout this workflow from when it's an idea in the designer mind all the way to when they have the first physical prototype in their hands. And Keysight is the only one, if one of the few, or if not the only one organization that has this complete set of tools to cover simulation, emulation, compliance, all the way to the physical prototypes, the physical devices. and the measurements itself. Keysight has decades of experience on the measurement space as well. Judy Warner (07:01) Everything you're saying, strangely enough, Roberto, I don't know if you caught the confirmation hearing for Pete Hicks that there was a lot of fireworks going back and forth, but right in the middle, he talked about, which, know, we rarely as an industry make mainstream news, but he stopped and he said, we need to lean into all the electronics issues. And he said, Roberto Piacentini Filho (07:16) Can you imagine? Judy Warner (07:31) Can you believe that people are just building physical prototypes of hardware and doing it over and over when they can do it virtually? This is an area in which we need to invest heavily. And I was like, well, hot darn, if I can find the clip, I'll put it here for our audience. But I think it's so fascinating that what you're talking about AI and that's going to affect defense and all aspects of our lives that, you know, we're making it to the mainstream and really, Roberta, same exact same thing you're saying about having that visibility and being able to build as your colleague Tim Wang says in a virtual sandbox before you commit it to a design and at least cut down or eliminate respins. yeah. Roberto Piacentini Filho (08:13) Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Because if you think about it, we have to move forward and AI is here to teach us to not teach us, but to enhance the way we do things. We're talking about from the perspective of how Keysight is empowering innovation, but very soon you're to start seeing on EDA solutions like the ones that we have at Keysight, EDA, ADS and so forth. You're going to hear the term AI enhanced to work well. So then AI is getting also into our tools to help. Judy Warner (08:43) Mmm. Roberto Piacentini Filho (08:45) make those workflows more efficient. And you're absolutely right. Why are we going to waste time and resources, physical resources and money, right? Every time you build a physical prototype, there's money involved, there are materials involved, then it's crap. mean, this is, and time, right, for you to build the prototype. I worked for it for several years, earlier in my career in the manufacturing plant as a test engineer. And there's so much work to There are so many steps for you to manufacture, print a circuit board, place all the components, make sure that it's correctly put in there. And then all the way when you get into the engineer designer to do the validation of prototype to realize that they made an incorrect connection and prototype is scrapped. And have to start over again and then you lose another week. So yeah, you have to use the tools and use the technology to help you be more efficient. Judy Warner (09:32) Yeah. Yeah, it's, well, we've been talking about these silos and how ineffective they are for years, but I do seem to observe this trend and it sounds like you're having those conversations internally as an organization is I think AI because the velocity is so demanding, it's gonna force engineers there. And I'm always like, get ahead or get run over. You know, it's... Roberto Piacentini Filho (10:04) Hahaha Judy Warner (10:06) It's quite something. There's a father, this is kind of just a fun side story. I interviewed the inventor of GAN technology. His name is Alex Alito. He's fascinating. Anyways, I interviewed him and in the background he had this really cool art piece of a Peterbilt truck, like huge, cover the wall. And I'm like, Alex, what's that about? He goes, it's the speed of innovation coming down on me. Roberto Piacentini Filho (10:32) No, I should. It's funny. Judy Warner (10:34) You know, he goes on the side on the scale of a Peterbilt truck. And that's sort of how I feel about our audience. Like run, get the tools, get your workflow because man, what times we're in. So, tell us a little bit about, now that we kind of know the overview of AI and scaling and the tools end end that Keysight's doing, what specific things are you either presenting at DesignCon or, know, Roberto Piacentini Filho (10:44) Yes. Exactly. Judy Warner (11:03) that's gonna help engineers get up to speed on these technologies so they can be successful. Roberto Piacentini Filho (11:11) Great, yeah. So first of all, I want to remind everybody that our booth is number 1039. So we just highlight a couple of demonstrations, have several of them. But in the context of what we discussed today, let me start with interconnects, right? And this means PCIe and chiplets. Those are two very interesting technologies that are really at the core of this computer units that we talked about in the data centers for AI infrastructure. So the first one is a demonstration for one of the newest additions that we had to the ADS family. It's the system designer for PCI Express. This is a complete end-to-end system that will help you design, interconnect interfaces, and simulate. Don't waste your time directly going to the prototype. You do the simulation, validate your design, support for PCIe PEM4 modulation. And it also in this demonstration is going to tie all the way to the measurement side. How do you do the correlation between? the simulation and the actual measurements after you have the first prototype. The other one that I think is important to mention in interconnects is chiplets. We didn't talk too much about chiplets. You and I had a podcast a while back, Judy, on chiplets. And chiplets is another very interesting technology that brings the flexibility into the AI infrastructure, right? Really quick, for those who don't know what is a chiplet, it's a modular, very dedicated piece of chip that you can... break the server into smaller functional blocks. And this is called chiplets. And then the chiplets, talk to each other. And it's very easy to add more modules if you need and so forth. So Chiplify designer were the industry first simulation solution that Keysight brought to market. And on the first release, we introduced support for UCIe, which is the universal chiplets interconnect standard. And with this year in 2025, we are expanding this solution with bunch of wires support, BLW. must see demonstration there. For networking, we talked about the capability of data centers to talk from one data center to the other within the data center, multiple servers. So for networking, we have a couple of demonstrations that are worth noting here. It's validation for 1.6 terabits per second pi. And we're also going to have a demonstration. This is a research demonstration using our arbitrary waveform generation solutions. for 3.2 terabits per second. So then this is also very interesting if you are super fast technology, right? Yes, right? And think about it, we oftentimes don't think that AI requires fast data transfers. You have this massive language models and this language models, have to exchange massive amount of data with each other. With us, when you make a question to it, you have to correlate data from many different sources and it takes speed for that. Judy Warner (13:37) well That's crazy. Mm Roberto Piacentini Filho (14:03) We also have 800 gigabit PAM for Ethernet interconnect tester. And this is for networking. For memory, we have another end-to-end simulation solution, the Memory Designer, which is part of the ADS family. We have a demonstration on LPDDR6. And this is just to name a few. We have other demonstrations that include USB. It includes the latest version of our Keysight EDA ADS software 2025 version. Just in a few demonstrations that I think it's really cool for designers to check it out. Judy Warner (14:37) It kind of blows me away. DDR6, I'm so sure. Tell me a little bit more about PAM4. Like I know a lot of changes. One, you make a good point about the tools you're building are to the latest standards, right? Cause that's a big piece of that ecosystem that designers are forced to design to, but how do they validate that? Not while they're measuring it on their bench. Roberto Piacentini Filho (14:45) Yeah. Judy Warner (15:05) but do some simulations ahead of time while the standards themselves are changing so fast. So tell me a little bit about PAM4 and how some of these standards are changing and how they're gonna impact people in our audience. Roberto Piacentini Filho (15:13) Exactly. Yes, great question. So one thing I was going to say is that Keysight was founded on the measurement side and indeed all this measurement science behind us. Keysight participates in several industry bodies that define this standards like JEDEC for memory, just as an example, the PCIe standard body will also participate in that. So then there's several standards where we are there. So then we have access to specifications before. Judy Warner (15:35) Mm. Roberto Piacentini Filho (15:48) it even becomes an official standard out there. So this gives us time to really understand the key technical aspects of it and then find tools, software and hardware solutions to be ready when the standard comes out so designers can have the latest and greatest solutions supporting the standards from the very, very beginning. Benport is an interesting upgrade to the... the PCIe and 10.4 by the way is not just used for PCIe there's several others like Ethernet for example is starting to use 10.4 and so forth. So really simple and I'm pretty sure the designers will relate to that. In the beginning you just have we just had two levels you had zero and ones right so then you have zero for zero volts and then you had like one with 4.5 volts and there are some additional future variations where the Judy Warner (16:20) Mm. Mm-hmm. Roberto Piacentini Filho (16:42) one level with lower voltages and so forth. But it was just two levels. With this four level amplitude, what happened is that you no longer have just two levels for zero and ones. You have four different levels that voltage levels for zero, zero, it's one voltage level. Zero, one, another voltage level. One, zero, another voltage level. And one, one, another voltage level. So then with these four different voltage levels, you can almost quadruple the speed that you're transferring the data because you have four levels. versus the zero and ones that you had before just with the two voltages. then, and PEN4 is at the beginning, and then you could expand to PEN8 and PENX, you know, as our technology, by our, mean, our collective technology evolves to support more accurate detection of this different voltage levels in there to be able to kind of push forward the different level of amplitudes that we can detect. So anyway, so this is... Judy Warner (17:13) Got it. Yes. Roberto Piacentini Filho (17:40) This is really cool and this is part of our latest solutions. We have support for that as well. Judy Warner (17:47) Yeah, for our audience, do have that. want to go back to speaking of the UCIE and Chiplets. I did interview Steven Slater. I'll put that link in the show notes for you if you're interested in Chiplets and Chiplet 5 because we did have a talk about that and he's on that standards body and gives a really cool insider view of that. So I'll put that in the show notes just on a side note if you want to see some of that. Okay, so what kind of, I know one thing I really appreciate you and why I'm so proud to have Keysight as part of one of our sponsors is that you lean so heavily into designer education and that's something I'm personally driven by. So what kind of things are you doing outside of the booth? Cause I know you guys always have a smattering of world-class presentations. Tell us a little bit about those because I know I got to let you go soon. Roberto Piacentini Filho (18:46) Yes, thank you for that. I almost forgot about this one. Keysight Education Forum, this is very important. I make a personal effort every year to fund that piece of this conference, which is we reserve a special room. This year is going to be Ballroom K, very close by the expo floor. And there we have education sessions for designers and engineers in various topics. So a few highlights I'm going to make here. You mentioned PCIe 6. We're to have a session there which will talk about the road to PCIe 7. We're already talking about PCIe 7, right? I mentioned Triplet interconnects bunch of wire support in this latest version of the Triplet 5 designer. There'll be a session about comparing UCIe versus bunch of wire protocol. There's also one really cool session about a systematic approach that is really accurate for crosstalk analysis. And one other session that I'm to mention on the Keysight Education Forum is design data and IP management. I talked about the importance of having tools that talk to each other and sharing these insights throughout the process, from your head, idea, concept, to simulation, emulation, first prototypes, manufacturing tasks, and so forth. And in Keysight a couple of years ago, we acquired a piece of technology really, really... that ties everything together. It's design data and IP management solution. Keysight has a leading solution in that space that was designed from the ground up to help you manage the design data, the schematics, help you with versioning control. It helps you find IP within your organization as a central hub for you to find IP as you're building your new designs. So this is a session that it's a must-see session. if you didn't know that Keysight had a solution for design data and IP manager. So it's once again, Keysight looking holistically and figure K. Besides all of these tools for the whole flow, now we need a solution that help you manage the data and IP throughout the flow. So don't forget to check it out. I'm to be in ballroom K for all of this KEF sessions. Judy Warner (21:00) Okay, and are those sessions, let's say you're not an ADS user, are these sessions useful to people who may not or maybe thinking about ADS tools? Like is there some good generalist information included in these presentations? Roberto Piacentini Filho (21:15) Yes, there is, there is. I'll share with you, Jodhya, link that you can probably share with your audience afterwards. You can see all of the abstracts of the sessions. And one thing that I want to highlight in here is that all of those sessions, they are presented by Keysight experts. Those are not marketing people. And I'm cleaning myself on this, right? I'm a technical guy. I've been in this for a long time. But those are really, really top-notch experts on the technology space. So you can watch the sessions if they're going to be hanging around. Judy Warner (21:22) Okay. Roberto Piacentini Filho (21:45) there on the room so you can ask specific questions about your project, DDR project, or PCI project, USB networking. There's all sorts of technologies that are going to be talking there. And I know I have a limited time, so don't forget to check out this link for the full agenda for the KEF session, the demonstrations that we have. We also have on this link that we're going to share the full list of papers that our experts put out there. And I'll leave you with this. Judy Warner (22:12) Okay, good. Roberto Piacentini Filho (22:13) parting thought and then I'll stop talking. There's another really cool paper to watch, is we talked about the infrastructure, but never forget power. I have one of my colleagues at Keysight say, don't forget power. And this is power delivery networks and mastering designs of 2000 amps plus. This is going to be crucial for the data centers that are housing this AI solution. So this is going to be in ballroom A this session. Judy Warner (22:24) huge. Right. Right. Tell him who's presenting that. Roberto Piacentini Filho (22:46) This is going to be Heidi and Steven. This is our two great top notch experts. Heidi has been doing this for such a long time and same as Steven. then they're going to be hanging around as well after the session. So then you can ask them questions about power delivery network and power integrity and signal integrity issues with power design. know all about Judy Warner (23:11) Well, I didn't know you were going to talk about this today, but we kind of stumbled upon it, but I will be interviewing that Heidi Barnes, Steve Sandler, Ben Dannen, and I will be interviewing them. And so you'll probably see them in the next episode talking specifically, and there's so much meat in that presentation. So I urge you to go see that and you will get to hear from those experts here shortly. Roberto Piacentini Filho (23:31) Awesome. Judy Warner (23:37) Well, I will be sure to get those links from you. Thank you for all your time. I'm sure you're so busy and I appreciate it always and appreciate all that you and Keysight do for design engineers. We really appreciate you, Roberto. Roberto Piacentini Filho (23:49) Alright, was a pleasure. Thank you, Judy. Judy Warner (23:52) For our listeners, make sure you go check out the show notes and go check it out. If you're not coming, there's things and resources you can go tap into. And if you are going, it'll give you a roadmap and help you navigate your way through some really important sessions. So thanks for joining us in this session for our DesignCon Tailgate party. We will see you next time. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. Music.