Digital IC Tester

Figure 1 

The purpose of the project is to simply identify and test the condition of digital IC if it is good or defective.

An IC tester can be applied to any type of digital ICs. There are some provisions that testing different ICs would require using different hardware. Creating another tester will involve more complex circuitry along with more consumed time. This IC tester was designed to overcome these problems by testing ICs without the need to rig up different kinds of circuits each time different kind of ICs are tested.

A 8951 microcontroller is used to build this IC tester along with a display unit and a keyboard. Any number of ICs can be tested within the constraint of the available memory since it is programmable and it can test digital ICs having a maximum of 24 pins. The IC is inserted into the socket and the IC number is entered using the keyboard, showing the number on the 7-segment display unit. The indicators are made up of 4 LEDs where each corresponds to the 4 gates of the IC. All 4 LEDs works as single indicator on non-logic gate IC.

Click here to see the rest of the project.