The characters on the surface of IC chip mainly include the manufacturer's name and serial number. These characters are of great practical significance for chip manufacturing and application. For the detection of printed characters on the chip surface, a chip character recognition system is developed based on Halcon visual software development platform. Firstly, the gray value projection method is used to obtain the row and column coordinate segmentation points of the character region for character segmentation. Then, the shape matching technology is used to locate and correct the chip image to be detected, and the BP neural network classification algorithm is used to realize character recognition. Through the comparative experimental analysis of different algorithms, the experimental results show that the detection time of a single picture is 42ms, the segmentation accuracy of complete characters and defective characters is 100%, and the character recognition rate is 99.5%. The system can effectively, quickly and accurately recognize the characters on the surface of IC chip, and the detection accuracy meets the requirements.