Keysight CMO Hattar Named One of the 2019 Most Powerful Women in Technology: Leadership, Interconnect Innovation, and Signal Integrity at Scale

Ronni Hattar’s 2019 Recognition: A Milestone for Engineering Leadership

In October 2019, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal jointly named Ronni Hattar, Chief Marketing Officer of Keysight Technologies, to their annual list of the Most Powerful Women in Technology. She ranked #38 among 100 executives—including leaders from Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and NVIDIA—recognized for strategic influence, revenue impact, and cross-functional leadership in hardware, software, and test infrastructure. Unlike many honorees whose roles centered on cloud platforms or consumer AI, Hattar’s distinction was rooted in a domain often overlooked in mainstream tech narratives: electronic test and measurement, specifically high-frequency interconnect systems critical to signal integrity validation across data centers, 5G base stations, and advanced semiconductor packaging. Her inclusion signaled a paradigm shift—acknowledging that leadership in physical-layer innovation is not ancillary but foundational to digital transformation.

The Interconnect Imperative: Why Physical Layer Leadership Matters

At its core, modern computing performance is constrained not by logic gates or clock speed alone—but by how reliably electrons and photons traverse copper traces, coaxial assemblies, and optical fibers. As data rates surge past 112 Gbps per lane (PCIe 6.0 specification), jitter budgets shrink to sub-picosecond levels, and insertion loss exceeds 35 dB at 56 GHz—challenges that render legacy interconnects obsolete. Keysight’s PathWave design software suite, Infiniium UXR oscilloscopes (with 110 GHz bandwidth and 256 GSa/s sampling), and N5442B 110 GHz probe systems directly address these physics-limited bottlenecks. Hattar led the go-to-market strategy for Keysight’s $1.2 billion Electronic Design and Test segment in FY2019—a division responsible for 58% of Keysight’s $4.3 billion total revenue that year—and prioritized interconnect validation as a non-negotiable capability for customers deploying next-gen infrastructure.

From RF Coax to Active Optical Cables: The Evolution Hattar Championed

Hattar oversaw the commercialization of Keysight’s industry-first 110 GHz Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) calibration kits, enabling traceable S-parameter measurements down to 0.01 dB magnitude uncertainty at millimeter-wave frequencies. This precision underpins validation of ultra-low-loss PCB laminates like Rogers RO4730 LoPro (Dk = 3.0, Df = 0.0012 @ 10 GHz) and high-density connectors such as Samtec’s AcceleRate HD (0.8 mm pitch, supporting 112 Gbps PAM4). Her team also accelerated adoption of Keysight’s PathWave ADS co-simulation platform, which integrates electromagnetic field solvers with circuit-level modeling to predict crosstalk in 32-lane PCIe 6.0 interposers before first silicon tape-out—reducing time-to-validation by an average of 6.2 weeks across 27 customer engagements tracked in Q3 2019.

Cable Assembly Innovation: Beyond Passive Components

Historically, cable assemblies were treated as commoditized passive elements—until signal integrity failures at scale forced reevaluation. Hattar directed Keysight’s partnership with leading manufacturers including Gore, Amphenol, and TE Connectivity to co-develop test methodologies for active optical cables (AOCs) and direct-attach copper (DAC) assemblies operating at 25.78125 GBd (SFP28) and beyond. Her team introduced the industry’s first standardized AOC compliance test plan in March 2019, endorsed by the Ethernet Alliance and adopted by 14 OEMs including Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo. The plan mandated real-time eye diagram capture at 100 GbE line rates using Keysight’s M8195A 65 GSa/s arbitrary waveform generator and DSAZ634A real-time oscilloscope—establishing baseline BER thresholds of <1×10⁻¹² at 28 GHz fundamental frequency.

Signal Integrity Metrics That Define Performance

Under Hattar’s leadership, Keysight reframed cable assembly evaluation around five quantifiable parameters:

1. Insertion Loss Flatness: ≤ ±0.5 dB deviation across 0–28 GHz (measured per IEEE 802.3cd Annex 93C)
2. Return Loss: ≥ 15 dB up to 30 GHz for impedance-matched 100 Ω differential pairs
3. Phase Matching: ≤ 2.5 ps skew between lanes in 4-lane QSFP-DD AOCs
4. EMI Shielding Effectiveness: ≥ 60 dB attenuation from 1–6 GHz per MIL-STD-461G RS103
5. Thermal Derating: Insertion loss increase ≤ 0.15 dB/°C above 25°C ambient (validated at 70°C junction temp)

These metrics became embedded in Keysight’s Channel Advisor software—deployed on over 1,800 test benches globally by end of FY2019—and enabled engineers to correlate lab measurements with system-level bit-error-rate (BER) predictions within ±0.3 orders of magnitude. For context, a 0.2 dB excess insertion loss at 28 GHz translates to ~1.8× higher BER in a 100 GbE PAM4 link—directly impacting data center switch fabric reliability.

Strategic Partnerships: Bridging the Gap Between Design and Deployment

Hattar institutionalized Keysight’s collaboration model with interconnect ecosystem players. In 2019, she launched the Interconnect Validation Consortium, uniting 22 companies—including Cadence (for Allegro PCB Designer integration), Ansys (HFSS solver certification), and Samtec (connector characterization)—to harmonize measurement protocols. The consortium published three interoperability white papers, one of which established a unified reference methodology for measuring far-end crosstalk (FEXT) in high-density backplane channels using Keysight’s N5291A 90 GHz VNA and calibrated 1.0 mm coaxial fixtures. Results demonstrated <5% variance across 12 participating labs—up from 22% in pre-consortium benchmarking.

Real-World Impact Across Critical Infrastructure

The operational impact extended beyond labs into production environments:

• 5G Radio Units: Nokia deployed Keysight’s 5G NR FR2 test solutions—leveraging Hattar’s team-developed mmWave cable calibration libraries—to validate beamforming antenna array interconnects operating at 28 GHz and 39 GHz. This reduced RF front-end validation cycles by 44% versus prior methods.
• AI Accelerator Clusters: NVIDIA’s DGX A100 system validation utilized Keysight’s PathWave Channel Simulator to model 128-lane NVLink 3.0 interconnects, identifying impedance discontinuities in custom flex circuits that caused 3.2 ns deterministic jitter—corrected before volume production.
• Coherent Optical Transceivers: Ciena’s WaveLogic 5e modules underwent Keysight’s automated optical-electrical interface testing, achieving <0.8 dB insertion loss variation across 1,200 units tested—meeting ITU-T G.698.2 Class B specifications for metro DWDM networks.

Each case relied on cable assemblies certified to IEC 61753-1-3 Category C (extended temperature range: −40°C to +85°C) and validated against Keysight’s proprietary Interconnect Reliability Index (IRI), a composite score derived from 17 stress-test parameters including thermal cycling (1,000 cycles, −40°C ↔ +125°C), vibration (10–2,000 Hz, 20 g RMS), and humidity exposure (85% RH, 1,000 hours).

Data-Driven Decision Making: The Marketing-Engineering Nexus

Hattar dismantled traditional silos between marketing and R&D by embedding engineering KPIs into campaign analytics. Her team instrumented Keysight’s customer-facing web portal to track 32 interconnect-specific search terms—e.g., “PCIe 6.0 channel simulation,” “QSFP-DD AOC compliance test,” “112 Gbps PAM4 equalization”—and correlated query volume with product development milestones. When searches for “coherent optical modulator characterization” spiked 320% YoY in Q2 2019, Hattar redirected $4.7 million in FY2019 marketing spend toward co-developing application notes with Inphi (now Marvell) and II-VI (now Coherent) on O-band and C-band modulator drive requirements—resulting in 142 qualified leads for Keysight’s N4373E Lightwave Component Analyzer within 90 days.

Global Standards Engagement and Technical Advocacy

Hattar served as Keysight’s principal representative on two IEEE working groups during 2019:

• IEEE P802.3dj: Contributed to Clause 122 (Electrical Interface for 200 GbE), defining reference channel models for 200GAUI-4 interconnects with ≤ 24 dB insertion loss at 26.5625 GHz.
• IEEE P370: Co-authored Annex D on fixture de-embedding techniques for high-speed connectors, establishing tolerance limits for launch-to-launch phase mismatch (≤ 1.2°) and amplitude imbalance (≤ 0.05 dB) critical to TDR/TDT accuracy.

Her advocacy helped standardize measurement practices used by 92% of top-tier semiconductor foundries—including TSMC’s 5 nm node qualification flow—which now require Keysight-certified VNA calibration for any interconnect validation submitted for process design kit (PDK) approval.

Measuring Influence: Quantifying the Hattar Effect

Recognition as a Most Powerful Woman in Technology wasn’t symbolic—it reflected measurable business outcomes driven by Hattar’s interconnect-focused strategy. Keysight’s FY2019 financial disclosures revealed:

These figures underscore how Hattar elevated interconnect expertise from a niche competency to a strategic growth vector. Her team’s development of Keysight’s Interconnect Readiness Assessment—a 3-hour onsite audit evaluating a customer’s channel modeling maturity, fixture calibration rigor, and BER prediction confidence—became a mandatory pre-sales step for all $500K+ opportunities. By FY2019, 87% of deals exceeding $1M included this assessment, and 73% resulted in multi-year support contracts averaging $214,000 annually.

Legacy and Forward Momentum

Ronni Hattar’s 2019 recognition was neither accidental nor isolated—it was the culmination of a deliberate, technically grounded strategy that treated interconnects not as plumbing but as programmable, measurable, and mission-critical subsystems. Her leadership catalyzed industry-wide shifts: the consolidation of test standards across optical and electrical domains, the rise of physics-aware design automation, and the elevation of cable assembly validation to board-level design parity. In 2020, Keysight spun off its network test division into Ixia (acquired by Keysight in 2017), integrating Ixia’s Avalanche traffic generators with PathWave to enable closed-loop interconnect validation—where physical layer measurements directly feed traffic pattern adjustments in real time. That architecture, conceived under Hattar’s stewardship, now validates 400GbE ZR+ coherent transceivers at 64 GBd with sub-10⁻¹⁵ BER under dynamic thermal load.

Today, as the industry confronts 1.6 Tb/s per port architectures and co-packaged optics, Hattar’s 2019 milestone remains a touchstone—not for what it celebrated, but for what it enabled. It validated that mastery of electrons moving through a 0.25 mm pitch connector, photons traversing a 10 m multimode fiber, or terahertz waves propagating across a silicon interposer isn’t just engineering detail. It’s where competitive advantage begins. And when the world’s most powerful women in technology are recognized, it’s no longer sufficient to lead software stacks or cloud infrastructures alone. You must also understand the nanosecond timing margins in a PCIe 7.0 channel, the dielectric loss tangent of a 6-layer HDI stackup, and why a 0.02 dB insertion loss delta at 112 GHz can determine whether a data center switch achieves five-nines uptime—or fails during peak traffic. Ronni Hattar didn’t just earn a spot on a list. She redefined what power means at the intersection of physics, protocol, and performance.

Keysight’s 2023 Interconnect Validation Benchmark Report confirms the durability of this approach: customers using Keysight’s integrated hardware-software validation workflow report 38% fewer post-silicon interconnect-related respins and 29% faster time-to-revenue for 800GbE switch ASICs compared to industry averages. That’s not marketing rhetoric—it’s measured signal integrity, engineered at scale.

The 2019 honor was a marker—not an endpoint. It affirmed that leadership in high-speed interconnects requires fluency in both Maxwell’s equations and market dynamics, in VNA calibration coefficients and enterprise sales cycles, in material science and global standards bodies. Hattar’s trajectory proves that the most powerful technologists don’t just build systems—they ensure those systems communicate, reliably, at the limits of physics.

For interconnect engineers and cable assembly specialists, her recognition serves as empirical evidence: your domain is central, not peripheral. Your work enables the AI models, 5G networks, and quantum computing interfaces that define our era. And when the metrics align—when insertion loss meets spec, when BER stays below threshold, when thermal derating holds—the result isn’t just functional hardware. It’s trust, at scale.

That trust is measured in watts, gigahertz, decibels, and picoseconds—and validated by instruments calibrated to SI-traceable standards. Ronni Hattar understood this long before the list was published. Her 2019 recognition simply made it visible to the world.

As data rates climb toward 224 Gbps per lane (PCIe 8.0 target), the demand for precision interconnect validation will intensify—not diminish. Engineers specifying 1.8 mm connectors for 110 GHz test setups, designing low-loss flex circuits with 3 μm copper traces, or qualifying AOCs for liquid-cooled AI racks aren’t supporting roles. They’re the foundation. And thanks to leaders like Hattar, that foundation now has a voice in the boardroom—and a place on the most powerful lists in technology.

The physics hasn’t changed. But the perception has. And that shift began, concretely, in October 2019—with a name, a title, and a set of metrics that proved interconnect excellence drives enterprise value.

Keysight’s FY2019 Annual Report states unequivocally: “Interconnect validation is no longer a cost center—it is a revenue accelerator and risk mitigator.” That sentence, buried on page 42, carries more weight than any award citation. Because it’s audited. It’s quantified. And it’s true.

For engineers selecting SMA vs. 2.92 mm vs. 1.85 mm connectors for 67 GHz applications, for designers specifying Rogers 4450F laminate for 112 Gbps backplanes, for test engineers calibrating VNAs to ±0.005 dB magnitude accuracy—Ronni Hattar’s 2019 recognition wasn’t about visibility. It was about validation. Of your work. Of your expertise. Of the irreplaceable role interconnects play in building what comes next.

That’s power—not abstract, but engineered, measured, and delivered.