Soft fault diagnosis for analog circuits based on slope fault feature and BP neural networks

Fault diagnosis is very important for development and maintenance of safe and reliable electronic circuits and systems. This paper describes an approach of soft fault diagnosis for analog circuits based on slope fault feature and back propagation neural networks (BPNN). The reported approach uses the voltage relation function between two nodes as fault features; and for linear analog circuits, the voltage relation function is a linear function, thus the slope is invariant as fault feature. Therefore, a unified fault feature for both hard fault (open or short fault) and soft fault (parametric fault) is extracted. Unlike other NN-based diagnosis methods which utilize node voltages or frequency response as fault features, the reported BPNN is trained by the extracted feature vectors, the slope features are calculated by just simulating once for each component, and the trained BPNN can achieve all the soft faults diagnosis of the component. Experiments show that our approach is promising.