India based semicon tester Tessolve gets VC funding and merges its business with DTS

India based semiconductor chip tester Tessolve Services is gaining stronger foothold in the fast growing business of outsourced semiconductor test services. Tessolve Services has recently received Series C round of venture funding from Reliance Venture Asset Management. Tessolve's other investors include Jafco, Applied Materials, Qualcomm Corp. and ST Asset Management (Singapore).

Harshal J. Shah, CEO, Reliance Venture Asset Management said, " Tessolve's strong engineering capabilities and its value proposition to customers has made it an industry pace-setter and we are proud to be their partners in success. "

Tessolve has planned to grow by increasing its market geographically as well as offering complete range of semiconductor chip test services. In this direction, Tessolve has formed a merged business with Dynamic Test Solutions (DTS). Tessolve and DTS have signed a definitive agreement to merge the two companies to form a new entity called Tessolve-DTS with headquarters in Bangalore, India.

The merged business will offer comprehensive test solutions for semiconductor companies through out the chip life cycle from first silicon functional test, to product release, and also the post-production services.

When this writer asked P. Raja Manickam, Founder, Tessolve Services on the benefits of this merger he said, "They (DTS) have large presence in U.S. and Europe markets and are in collaboration with customers in those markets, we gain access to the customers in US and Europe, they will bring us customers and value added technical competencies".
On overlap of customers, he said, there is hardly 10 % with overlap and the rest 90% with no overlap.

Jill Johnston, President and CEO of DTS said, "Separately both Tessolve and DTS have built successful companies in their respective areas of expertise in test solutions. This is a logical evolution that builds on our individual success, as well as the strong working relationship we have formed over the past few years. Combined, we can offer a much more robust and efficient way to serve global companies. Our deep experience across the entire test process, combined with our global infrastructure of service and support, will uniquely position us to capitalize on the continuing move by IDMs and fabless companies to leverage the cost and time to market benefits of outsourced test services,".

Tessolve does the testing of very high end digital and analog/mixed signal chips, which includes high frequency RF analog and digital chips made at the latest nodes of 45nm. Tessolve is well equipped with 50,000 square foot testing facility at Bangalore with latest test systems and the expert engineers for testing advanced complex chips.