Fault dictionary based switched current circuit fault diagnosis using entropy as a preprocessor

• Authors: Ying Long;Yigang He;Lifen Yuan
• Venue: Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
• Year: 2011

A novel method based on a fault dictionary that uses entropy as a preprocessor to diagnose faulty behavior in switched current (SI) circuit is presented in the paper. The proposed method uses a data acquisition board to extract the original signal form the output terminals of the circuit-under-tests. These original data are fed to the preprocessors for feature extraction and finds out the entropies of the signals which are a quantitative measure of the information contained in the signals. The proposed method has the capability to detect and identify faulty transistors in SI circuit by analyzing its output signals with high accuracy. Using entropy of signals to preprocess the circuit response drastically reduces the size of fault dictionary, minimizing fault detect time and simplifying fault dictionary architecture. The result from our examples showed that entropies of the signals fall on different range when the faulty transistors` Transconductance Gm value varying within their tolerances of 5 or 10%, thus we can identify the faulty transistors correctly when the response do not overlap. The average accuracy of fault recognition achieved is more than 95% although there are some overlapping data when tolerance is considered. The method can classify not only parametric faults but also catastrophic faults. It is applicable to analog circuits as well as SI ones. A low-pass and a band-pass SI filter and a Clock feedthrough cancellation circuit have been used as test beached to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. A comparison of our work with Yuan et al. (IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 59(3):586---595, 2010), which used entropy and kurtosis as preprocessors, reveals that our method requiring one feature parameter reduces the computation and fault diagnosis time.