Test Cost

Cost Estimation and Quoting for Test and Measurement Operations

What actually drives cost per tested unit, from tester capital per second to probe card consumption and burn-in energy, plus a method to quote it defensibly.

The dominant cost in electronic test is not labor, it is tester capital per second. A 1.2 million dollar ATE system depreciated over 5 years across 6,000 productive hours per year gives 40 dollars per hour, or 0.011 dollars per second. Multiply by cycle time from your Final Test Takt work: a 28 second cycle books 0.31 dollars of tester time per unit before you add anything else. Estimators who quote on labor rate alone routinely miss this and underprice high-mix, low-volume test where the tester sits idle between lots and the effective per-unit rate can triple.

Probe card and contactor consumption is the second big line and the one most often forgotten. Use Probe Card Life Cost: a 55,000 dollar card rated for 2 million touchdowns costs 0.0275 dollars per touchdown. At 4 touchdowns per unit that is 0.11 dollars per unit, but cards rarely reach rated life. If contact degradation forces replacement at 1.4 million touchdowns, real cost jumps to 0.157 dollars per unit, a 43 percent hit. Build the quote on realized life from your own logs, not the datasheet number, and add a cleaning and re-tip allowance of 8 to 12 percent.

Burn-in is priced on energy and dwell, not on labor. Model rack occupancy from Burn-In Rack Capacity, then attach cost. A rack drawing 9 kW over a 48 hour dwell consumes 432 kWh; at 0.12 dollars per kWh that is 51.84 dollars per fill. If the fill holds 110 good units, burn-in energy is 0.47 dollars per unit. Add rack amortization: a 180,000 dollar rack over 7 years and 6,000 hours is 4.29 dollars per hour, another 2.06 dollars per rack-hour spread across the fill. Long dwells that add little reliability confidence are pure margin erosion.

Labor still matters, but as loaded rate against attended time, not wall-clock time. A test technician at 32 dollars per hour with a 1.45 burden multiplier is 46.40 dollars loaded, or 0.0129 dollars per second. On a fully automated station with one operator watching four handlers, attended labor per unit is a quarter of cycle time: for a 28 second cycle that is 7 seconds, or 0.09 dollars. This is why automation pays. Manual functional test at one operator per station puts the full 0.36 dollars of labor on every unit, four times the automated figure.

Calibration and metrology overhead is a fixed cost you must amortize onto units, and quotes routinely omit it. From the Calibration Interval Workload view, an 800 event annual program at a fully loaded 140 dollars per event is 112,000 dollars per year. Spread across 900,000 tested units that is 0.124 dollars per unit. Skip it in the quote and you have silently donated over 100,000 dollars of margin. The Measurement Uncertainty Margin also carries cost: tighter guardbanding raises false-reject scrap, and each point of added fallout on a 3 dollar board at 900,000 units is 27,000 dollars.

Yield and retest are the multipliers that wreck naive estimates. Cost per good unit equals cost per test attempt divided by first-pass yield, plus retest cost times the retested fraction. At 0.85 dollars per attempt and 94 percent first-pass yield, the good-unit floor is 0.90 dollars. Add retest: if 6 percent get one 0.85 dollar retest, that is another 0.051 dollars, landing near 0.95 dollars per good unit, an 12 percent premium over the nominal. Quote on yielded cost, and pull the yield number from Returned Unit Diagnostic Time trends so field escapes feed back into your pricing.

Fixture and program non-recurring engineering (NRE) should be amortized, not buried. A 45,000 dollar fixture plus 120 hours of test-program development at 95 dollars per hour is 56,400 dollars of NRE. Over a 250,000 unit program that is 0.226 dollars per unit; over a 40,000 unit program it balloons to 1.41 dollars. This is the single largest reason the same test looks cheap at one customer and expensive at another. Always show NRE as a separate line with a stated amortization volume, so a low-volume buyer sees why their per-unit number is higher.

A defensible quote stacks these as explicit lines: tester time, consumables (probe card plus contactor), burn-in energy and amortization, attended labor, calibration overhead, NRE amortization, then a yield divisor and a scrap allowance. For a mid-volume board that often totals 1.60 to 2.40 dollars per good unit. Add a 10 to 15 percent contingency for the two inputs that move most, realized probe card life and first-pass yield. When you lose a bid, revisit those two before cutting margin, because a 3 point yield swing usually outweighs the entire labor line.

Published 2026-07-01.