The ever-increasing miniaturization of digital electronic components is hampering the conventional testing of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) by means of bed-of-nails fixtures. Basically this is caused by the very high scale of integration of ICs, through which packages with hundreds of pins at very small pitches of down to a fraction of a millimetre, have become available. As a consequence the trace distances between the copper tracks on a printed circuit board cmne down to the same value. Not only the required small physical dimensions of the test nails have made conventional testing...