Keysight Technologies, Inc. announced it has achieved the industry’s first public interoperability demonstration of Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specification with Link Layer Retry (LLR) and Credit-Based Flow Control (CBFC) at 800GE line rate, in collaboration with Broadcom at OFC 2026.
Traditional Ethernet architectures are increasingly strained by the massive east-west traffic, congestion sensitivity and tail latency requirements of large AI clusters. As hyperscalers and enterprises scale AI infrastructure, next-generation link layer capabilities such as LLR and CBFC are becoming critical to maintaining network efficiency, resiliency and predictable performance.
The milestone highlights Keysight’s growing role in enabling validation and performance assurance for AI scale-up and scale-out networks, where next-generation Ethernet capabilities are becoming critical to cluster efficiency and reliability.
The live demonstration features interoperability between Keysight’s Interconnect and Network Performance Tester and Broadcom’s Tomahawk Ultra Ethernet switch, operating at full 800GE line rate. LLR enables local error recovery and reduces tail latency. CBFC enables link layer flow control. These capabilities are increasingly required to support large-scale AI workloads.
Keysight is a key contributor within the UEC and is active in the emerging Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) ecosystem supporting the newly released 1.0 specification, helping define validation methodologies for advanced link layer capabilities. Early interoperability efforts such as this demonstration are designed to accelerate ecosystem readiness and support adoption of the standard.
The successful interoperability with Broadcom’s Tomahawk Ultra Ethernet switch represents an important step toward production-ready Ultra Ethernet infrastructure for AI-optimised networks.
Asad Khamisy, VP and GM, Core Switch Group at Broadcom, said: “High-performance Ethernet is the technology of choice for AI Networking, and Broadcom was a founding member of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. Verifying compliance and interoperability is key to creating an open ecosystem, and with Keysight, Broadcom has found a partner who is able to keep up with our industry-leading pace.”
Ram Periakaruppan, VP and GM, Network Applications & Security business at Keysight, said: “As AI clusters push network performance to new extremes, technologies like Ultra Ethernet are becoming essential to next-generation fabrics. Keysight is focused on ensuring these innovations can be validated, interoperable, and ready for real-world deployment.”