For thermal testing in the lab you have several choices. If your product must be convection cooled, you can select a benchtop temperature chamber. Or you can use a temperature forcing system to deliver conditioned air to your ATE test site. You don't necessarily need an environmental chamber to test your product's temperature performance. Figure 3 .
Many vendors combine environmental-test capabilities with other functions.
Figure 4 . Careful control of semiconductor temperatures operating near device thermal limits is critical to ensuring an adequate test while not destroying the device. If your product doesn't lend itself to conductive heating and cooling, you can choose a simple oven to convectively apply thermal stress to your devices before testing them. Going a step further, you can cycle the devices through thermal extremes at programmable rates of temperature change. The limit of such testing is the thermal shock test, in which your product plunges nearly instantaneously from a hot thermal chamber to a cold one, or vice versa.