Bed of nails tester

Devices that have been tested on a bed of nails tester may show evidence of this after the process: small dimples (from the sharp tips of the Pogo pins) can often be seen on many of the soldered connections of the PCB.

Moreover, vacuum fixtures cannot be used on bed-of-nails systems that are used in automated production lines, where the board is automatically loaded to the tester by a handling mechanism.

But in mass production, test point diameters of 1.0 mm or higher are normally used to minimise contact failures, leading to lower remachining costs.

It can be challenging to optimize for ideal support locations and probe forces without spending resources designing and building an ICT fixture.

More recently, some have looked at finite element simulation to proactively design or adjust an ICT fixture to avoid these mechanical failure modes.