Wort des Tages
30 January 2026
bed of nails
A device for testing a chip, consisting of an array of spring-loaded pins.
Warum dieses Wort
Named for the obvious visual, but the point is parallelism: hundreds of spring pins land at once, so every net gets probed in a single press instead of one probe at a time. Worn or dirty tips are a common source of false fails.
In use
Board's failing continuity on half the nets, so before I chase it further I'm cleaning the bed of nails and running it again.
Written by our editors to show how the term is used, not a recorded quotation.