‘Million unit’ company offers RF test and services

Presto Engineering CEO Michel Villemain founded the company in 2006 and established its first facility in San Jose in 2007 under an agreement with Cypress Semiconductor. Villemain cited his rationale for starting the company, saying that after years of experience at companies including Schlumberger (later NPTest), KLA-Tencor, and FEI, “I became more and more convinced that part of the future of the semiconductor equipment business would be services.”

Throughout his tenure at Schlumberger and FEI, he said, his customers included 400 or so labs. But as technology evolved and became more complex, only about 20 of those labs could afford to upgrade to the latest equipment every year. Presto’s goal, he said, was to address the needs of the remaining 380 labs.

“I coined the ‘labless’ concept at the time,” Villemain added, noting that at the front end, foundries had enabled semiconductor manufactures to become fabless. “I said, let’s try to mimic that and create a labless segment at the back end.”

In 2010, under an agreement with NXP (similar to the earlier one with Cypress), Presto established a facility in Caen, Normandy. It also was expanding its offerings beyond the failure-analysis services it originally offered into production test and other engineering services.

“As we were going through this process, we really took a hard look at what we could uniquely offer to our customers, and by doing this for several years in California and in Europe, we found out that to create value we had to specialize,” he said. “So we needed to establish our uniqueness. Through lots of customer dialog and discussion of requirements, we decided to focus on analog, mixed-signal, and RF.” And in addition to offering customers Presto’s own internal capabilities, he said, “Presto develops partnerships to insert additional capabilities that we don’t do in Presto proper but that we know how to manage”—such as assembly. “We can expand our offerings to be a one-stop shop,” he added.

When asked if Presto focuses on consumer or infrastructure RF, Villemain said the company’s engineering services apply to both. “We qualify devices going into smart phones,” he said. “When it comes to production, obviously we can’t compete at high volumes with other organizations that are doing that very well.”

He described Presto as a “million unit” type of company. Presto offers companies needing to produce 10,000 units per year the capability to move out of their own labs and onto a professional test floor. Presto, he said, bridges the gap between 10,000 and 1 million units. When customers surpass the million-unit threshold, he said, Presto congratulates them and assists in transitioning to a higher volume organization.

Villemain said Presto divides the RF world into standard RF, up to 10 GHz, and high-speed communications (HSC), beyond 10 GHz. Within HSC, he said, he sees three sectors: the K, Ka, and Ku bands from 12 to 40 GHz; the V band, in which there is a lot of consumer-related activity (WiGig, for example) around 60 GHz; and the E band.

This third segment is a recent focus for Presto. In October, the company launched a wafer-level E-band RF production-scale testing service in Caen.  E-band finds use in wireless backhaul, he said, an area now seeing lots of engineering activity. He said the company was prompted to offer E band capabilities because “we already have a couple of customers that are crossing that 10,000-unit line and getting ready to move into volume production.” He noted that the volumes will be infrastructure-type volumes—not consumer-level volumes.

Villemain said the company collaborates with traditional ATE vendors including Advantest, Teradyne, and Xcerra. Higher frequencies require network analyzers, high-speed oscilloscopes, BERTs, and other instruments typically deployed in a rack-and-stack configuration. Rack-and-stack systems, he said, are evolving toward more integration to eliminate custom wiring and to make them scalable, but the evolution is a work in progress.

In another recent initiative, Presto selected the new Tektronix HDMI 2.0 solution to extend its HDMI test capabilities. Presto will work with Tektronix to expand its test coverage on high-speed serial bus interfaces including USB 3.0, PCI Express, Ethernet 40G, and DDR. HDMI capability is fairly consistent with Presto’s high-speed communications positioning, Villemain said, even though HDMI is more digital than analog. “It’s good for us to develop competency on the digital side of these links to complement our analog practice,” he said.

As for trends, Villemain said he sees optical communications moving from long-haul metro installations into the data center, which creates traction from a volume standpoint and the need to bring optical communications technology onto the printed-circuit board. “From a testability standpoint, it’s very similar to RF or high-speed analog,” he said. “It’s just that from the stimulus aspect you need to position a fiber light source very carefully and very accurately to test these devices.” He concluded, “We see the next step as silicon photonics.”