A circuit-centric approach to electronic system-level diagnostics and prognostics

Electronic system failures during field operation in mission, safety and infrastructure critical applications can have severe implications. In these applications, incorporating prognostics and health management (PHM) techniques provide systems with capabilities to self assess performance, determine the advent of failure and mitigate system risks. However, the prognostics problem for electronic systems is still approached from a component-centric-view. Extending a component-centric approach to an electronic system becomes complex and is often not worth the cost of pursuit due to the imbalance between scalability and efficiency of the prognostics approach. In order to address this problem, we propose a circuit-centric approach as an alternative method for realizing prognostics at an electronic system-level. The proposed approach is developed from the idea of decomposing a system into multiple critical circuits, and exploiting the parameters specific to the system's circuitries for predicting failure. Furthermore, a method is developed for detecting the gradual degradation of an electronic system by defining a health indicator to represent the system's health state at any given time. In this paper, we provide a formulation of the electronic system-level prognostics problem and demonstrate the approach on an electronic system for filtering analog signals.