Testing activities represent a considerable portion of the life cycle of a complex integrated circuit. An Automated Test Equipment (ATE), broadly speaking, is the collection of hardware and software that engineers use to test and validate prototypes of complex circuit designs. Although the work done in these test environments is critical to the successful production of integrated circuits, engineers seldom have any exposure to them during their training. Pictured here is the Teradyne J973 ATE. An environment such as this costs several million dollars.

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