The first Agilent 93000 Pin Scale delivered to Tessolve

Tessolve is using the system to test digital and mixed-signal devices for its major integrated device manufacturers and fabless customers as well as for emerging local customers in India. The Pin Scale system was chosen by Tessolve for its ability to test ICs, systems-on-a-chip (SOCs), and systems-in-packages (SIPs) within a full range of bandwidths between 200 Mbps and 3.6 Gbps. India has already become a world leader in software services, and is poised to do the same in the semiconductor industry. According to Bryan Wang, an analyst at In-Stat, India will have the world's fastest-growing electronics industry over the next several years, outpacing even China. The Indian electronics market, worth $11.5 billion in 2004, will hit a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent to reach $40 billion by 2010, said Wang. Many of the top semiconductor companies, including Intel, Texas Instruments, IBM, Samsung, Freescale, Toshiba and Infineon, have design and manufacturing centers in India, which presents a clear opportunity for Tessolve. "We opened our 50,000-square-foot chip testing center in Bangalore to put an end to India's testing limitations for SOC designs coming out of India," said Raja Manickam, chief executive officer of Tessolve. "Now, with our purchase of the Agilent 93000, Tessolve is positioned to become India's leading independent semiconductor test house. Eighty percent of India's semiconductor design houses are already based in Bangalore, and the Agilent Pin Scale test system allows us to offer them a low-cost, scalable platform that can be employed from characterization to high-volume manufacturing." The Pin Scale system will provide Tessolve broad scalability as it allows each test pin to be flexibly and instantaneously configured to adapt to changing test needs. Tessolve's Pin Scale system also includes the Agilent InstaPin performance library, which enables the system to be configured to match a device's requirements pin-by-pin, resulting in a lower cost of test. Additionally, because each pin offers both single-ended and differential I/O test capabilities, Tessolve will be able to use the Pin Scale system for testing a wide range of interfaces, including USB2.0, IEEE 1394, DDR, G-DDR, PCI Express, S-ATA, HyperTransport and Front Side Bus. The 93000 Pin Scale system supports up to 2,048 pins, providing the pin count needed to handle both multisite test and devices with high pin counts. "The 93000 Pin Scale system provides Tessolve with a very clear advantage in Bangalore," said Pascal Ronde, vice president of Agilent's Automated Test Group. "Until now, locally based test houses and multinational corporations used overseas testing facilities mainly to perform digital and mixed-signal test. The Agilent 93000 now allows those types of chip tests to be conducted locally, at a great time and cost savings to local design houses."