A dictionary approach to fault location in linear circuits

The authors present a new approach to locating soft faults in linear circuits using the dictionary method. The authors show the uniqueness of a linear subspace (corresponding to a multiple-soft-fault), and this feature has been chosen to generate the dictionary in a pretest phase. After testing, the signature of the fault is recovered by the transformation of circuit measurements under multiple input. The effects of component tolerances are also considered. A practical algorithm to carry out the approach is realized by estimating the variances of the signatures from the given tolerances of circuit parameters. The application of the method is demonstrated with an active RC filter.<>