Bed of nails tester

A traditional bed of nails tester is a test fixture comprising pins inserted into holes in an acrylic plate which are aligned to make contact with test points on a printed circuit board and are also connected to a measuring unit by wires.

Typically, four to six weeks are needed for the manufacture and programming of such a fixture.

"During board layout, one of the primary concerns is that accurate tooling holes and appropriate test pad size and location are all critical to increasing the probability that the spring-loaded probes in a bed-of-nails test fixture will reliably make contact and transfer signals to and from the board under test." Blackwell, The Electronic Packaging Handbook