Keysight scoops up Easics

Belgian chip design services company Easics has been acquired by electronics test and measurement specialist Keysight Technologies. The Easics team will become part of Keysight Labs, the central applied research laboratory of the US firm and a descendant of the original Hewlett-Packard Laboratories founded in 1966. The lab already runs a site dedicated to ASIC and FPGA design in Rotselaar, near Easics’ headquarters in Leuven.

“Keysight and Easics have a long and successful history of working together. The acquisition will enable Keysight to expand its ASIC design capacity and accelerate innovation to meet the challenges of ultra-wide-bandwidth and high-speed digital requirements for 6G. By joining forces, we can unlock even greater innovation to provide tremendous value to an even larger set of customers and stakeholders,” Dan Thomasson, head of Central Technology and vice president of Keysight Labs, answered in response to an emailed inquiry from Bits&Chips.

Easics was spun out of Imec and the electrical engineering department of KU Leuven in 1991 to provide commercial ASIC and FPGA design services for signal processing and telecommunications applications. In the early 2000s, the firm briefly served as the R&D center of now-defunct communications-IC IP company Transwitch. In 2021, network and artificial intelligence (AI) product/IP solutions for system developers of health and industrial products were added to the company’s portfolio.