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The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

ICEMI2013

Diagnostics of Incipient Faults in Analog Circuits


Li Min, Long Bing, Xian Weiming, Wang Houjun
School of Automation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu 611731,
China
Phone: +86-28-6183-0316, Fax: +86-28-6183-1310, E-mail: longbing@uestc.edu.cn
accuracy, we propose to employ LSSVM as the
classifier. In addition, the extracting features of the
aforementioned incipient fault diagnosis methods are
unfamiliar to the operator. Hence, the statistical
property feature vector which is familiar to operator
and can reflect the global property of output response
is used in this paper.
Multi-fault diagnosis for analog circuits based on
SVM is typically solved by combining many binary
SVM classifiers. Most researchers used a single
feature vector to train all SVM binary classifiers [4].
However, each SVM binary classifier has different
classification accuracy for different feature vectors.
On the other hand, to obtain the high classification
accuracy whilst reducing the physical size of feature
vector, some form of feature selection that is capable
of selecting the most significant features of a feature
set must be used. Xu et al. [2] used the LDA to
decrease the dimensions of the feature vector. Jack et
al. [5] proposed to use genetic algorithm (GA) to
select the most significant features from a large set of
possible features in machine condition monitoring. By
considering that the evolutionary algorithm-particle
swarm optimization (PSO) has many advantages, such
as simple concept, easy implementation, and quick
convergence [6] and the Mahalanobis distance (MD)
[7]-[8] is a useful way of determining similarity of an
unknown sample to a known one, the MD based on
PSO is used to select a near-optimal feature vector for
each binary classifier.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II
describes the diagnostic procedure based on LSSVM
for analog circuits. Section III briefly presents the
statistical property feature vector of analog circuits.
Section IV proposes the near-optimal feature vector
selected by MD based on PSO. Section V shows the
simulation results. Conclusions are drawn in Section
VI.

Abstract Diagnosis of incipient faults for analog circuits is


very important, yet very difficult. A novel approach for
incipient faults in analog circuits is proposed. Firstly, the
statistical property feature vector, which is composed of range,
mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, entropy and
centroid, is used to reflect the global property of output
response. Then, the least squares support vector machine
(LSSVM) is used for diagnostics of the incipient faults in
analog circuits. Traditionally, multi-fault diagnosis for analog
circuits based on SVM usually uses a single feature vector to
train all binary SVM classifier. However, in fact, each binary
SVM classifier has different classification accuracy for
different feature vectors. Therefore, the Mahalanobis distance
(MD) based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed
to select a near-optimal feature vector and decrease the
dimensions of the feature vector for each binary classifier. The
experiment results show as following: (1) The accuracy using
the near-optimal feature vectors is better than the accuracy
using a single vector; (2) The consuming time of the nearoptimal feature vectors selected by MD based on PSO is
reduced about 98% in comparison to the time of the optimal
feature vectors selected by the exhaustive method.
Keywords analog circuits; diagnostics, incipient faults, least
squares support vector machine, particle swarm optimization,
Mahalanobis distance.


I. INTRODUCTION
More and more attention is being attached on the
performance degradation monitoring so that failure
can be predicted and prevented. This is referred as the
condition-based maintenance (CBM) [ 1 ] . The
diagnosis of the incipient faults, such as shifts in
performance parameters, is crucial, yet very difficult.
Xu et al. [2] has proposed to use the output voltage,
autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) coefficients,
and wavelet transform coefficients as the
combinational feature vector whose dimensions were
reduced by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to train
hidden Markov model (HMM) for incipient fault
diagnosis of analog circuits. Deng et al. [3] has
proposed to use the fault features extracted based on
the fractional correlation and the sub-band Volterra
series to train HMM for incipient fault diagnosis of
nonlinear analog circuits. The aforementioned
incipient fault diagnosis methods are all based on
HMM, and the difference mainly lies in their ways of
extracting the feature. To improve the classification

II. DIAGNOSTIC PROCEDURE BASED


ON LSSVM
A diagnostic procedure for analog circuits based on
LSSVM involves four phases: data collecting phase,
preprocessing phase, training phase, and diagnostic
phase. Though data collecting is a time-consuming
work, it is not too difficult in technique. In the training
phase and diagnostic phase, a well-made LSSVM

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978-1-4799-0759-5 /13/$31.00 2013 IEEE




The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

toolbox, such as LSSVMlab toolbox, can be directly


used in the diagnosis of analog circuits. The
LSSVMlab toolbox can help us avoid duplicated work
and make the diagnostic program reliable. The
preprocessing is another key phase, which will focus
on how to define the feature vectors of CUTs and how
to select a near-optimal feature vector.

(8)
2

24 /(16 3  27) ,

2
2
G ( x) x exp( x / 2) , G ( x) exp( x / 2) .
The centroid of the closed region which is formed
by the waveform of signal and axes can be obtained as
follows:
1

f

u0

ug ( u ) du

f
f
f

(10)

g (u ) du

For a zero-mean discrete-valued signal, the


equation (10) can be written as follows:
M

n0

n u x(n)
n 1
M

x(n)

(11)

n 1

E ( x  m) 2

IV. FEATURE VECTOR SELECTION


A. Mahalanobis Distance

The MD methodology distinguishes multivariable


data groups by a univariate distance measure that is
calculated from the measurements of multiple
parameters [7-8].
The MD approach can provide a number for
gauging similarity of an unknown sample set to a
known one. Generally, the two samples are more
similar, and more possible to belong to the same fault
class if their MD value is smaller. Thus, MD can be
used to classify samples from two different fault
classes. Based on this idea, the feature vector with
high recognition rate classified by MD is used to train
and test LSSVM classifier for any two fault classes of
analog circuits. But MD is just one kind of similarity
metrics and can not find an optimal feature vector for
any data set. Therefore, the feature vector with high
recognition rate classified by MD is a near-optimal
vector, not an optimal one.

(5)

where v is the standard deviation.


Kurtosis is defined in the zero-mean case by the
following equation:
kurt ( x) E{x 4 }  3[ E{x 2 }]2
(6)
Kurtosis is a measure of the heaviness of tails in
distribution of signal x and can be used to establish
an effective statistical test in identifying changes of
signals.
Entropy is a fundamental concept of the
information theory. The entropy H of a random
variable x with density p(x) is defined as follows:

 p( x) log p( x)dx

( x ( n))
2

(9)
where
k1 36 /(8 3  9) , k2

(4)
The skewness which is a measure
of the asymmetry

of the data around the mean value is defined as
follows:

H ( x)

(n)

n 1
M

H ( x) | k1 ( E{G1 ( x)}) 2  k2 ( E{G 2 ( x)}  1/ 2) 2

The range which is a measure of the maximum


scope of the changes of the data is defined as follows:
w xmax  xmin
(2)
The mean value and standard deviation of signal
x are defined as below:
m E ( x)
(3)

n 1

where w, m, v, s, k , e, n are range, mean, standard


deviation, skewness, kurtosis, entropy, and centroid of
response signal x respectively.

[ E ( x  m)]3
v3

where M is the length of the signal. And the equation


(7) can be approximated as follows:

To determine the global properties of the response


curve, the statistical property features which are
familiar to operator are proposed. Therefore, we
propose to use range, mean, standard deviation,
skewness, kurtosis, entropy and centroid to constitute
a statistical feature vector. That is,
F [ w, m, v, s, k , e, n]
(1)

var( x)

E{x 4 }
[ E{x 2 }]2

kurt ( x)

III. FEATURE VECTOR OF ANALOG


CIRCUITS

ICEMI2013

(7)

However, during the analog circuit fault diagnosis,


it is very difficult to calculate the kurtosis and entropy
based on equation (6) and (7). Usually, the unbiased
estimate or approximation is used to obtain kurtosis
and entropy. Then, the equation (6) can be written as
follows:

B. Particle Swarm Optimization

Its basic idea is that each solution of an


optimization problem is called a particle and a fitness




The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

ICEMI2013

function is defined to measure the degree of


superiority of every particle.
The choice of fitness function is another primary
factor to influence the performance of the PSO
algorithm. To find a near-optimal feature vector, the
feature vector with high recognition rate classified by
MD should be selected. Therefore, the fitness function
is chosen as the maximum of recognition rate
classified by MD.
It is known that the PSO algorithm adepts in real
number coding. In order to select the near-optimal
feature vectors easily, an additional step which
converts a real number to a binary coding is added.
Based on equation (1), we use 7-bits to represent the
original feature vector sequentially. For example, if
the binary string is 0010101, then the standard
deviation, kurtosis and centroid are selected.

Fig. 2. Flowchart of the near-optimal feature vector


selected by MD based on PSO.

C. Near-Optimal Feature Vector Selected By MD


Based on PSO

Since the feature vector with high recognition rate


classified by MD may differ among every two fault
classes, multiple binary LSSVM classifiers are used.
The classification accuracy for the feature vector with
high recognition rate classified by MD does not
always have the optimal accuracy, but it is better than
most of the feature vectors. Though it is not an
optimal feature selection method, it provides an easy,

Fig. 1. Flowchart of the near-optimal diagnostic program


based on LSSVM.




The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

effective approach to select a near-optimal feature


vector, which is useful for automatic testing and
diagnosis of analog circuits.
The flowchart of the near-optimal diagnostic
program based on LSSVM using the feature vector
with high recognition rate classified by MD is shown
in Fig.1. And, the flowchart of the near-optimal
feature vector selected by MD based on PSO is shown
in Fig. 2. To evaluate the performance of our proposed
method, we have also implemented an optimal
diagnostic procedure using an exhaustive method
based on LSSVM classifier.

ICEMI2013

(10.5+11.5)/2=11K. After that, the tolerance of the


mean value needs to be found. It is found that the
tolerance should be set to 4.5% owing to the following:
11*(1+4.5%) =11.495K, 11*(1-4.5%) =10.505K.
Therefore, the fault value of the faulty components can
no longer be set to a fixed value, and then, based on
Monte Carlo analysis, the complete and reasonable
fault dictionary can be established. Based on the idea
of MVT, the fault values of the leapfrog filters
components are shown in Table 2. In our work, only
single incipient fault has been considered.
Table 1. Fault intervals for all faulty components.

V. SIMULATION RESULTS
The experimental circuit is a leapfrog filter (Fig.3),
which is a benchmark circuit of ITC97 [9]. The
tolerance of the resistors and capacitors are set to 5%
and 10% respectively. There are many components in
the filter, and some components such as R1, R2, R3,
R4, R8 and C2 that are more sensitive to the test
signal than the other components, are selected as the
potential faulty components. For each of the faulty
components, two soft-fault classes are shown as
follows: a class for the component values larger than
the nominal one (labeled by) and the other for the
component values smaller than the nominal one
(labeled by). Therefore, 12 fault classes, in addition to
the fault-free condition, are simulated, and output of
the leapfrog filter is used as the test node.

Faulty
Component
R1

[1.05Yna1.15Yn]

[0.85Yn0.95Yn]

R2

[1.05Yn1.15Yn]

[0.85Yn0.95Yn]

R3

[1.05Yn1.15Yn]

[0.85Yn0.95Yn]

R4

[1.05Yn1.15Yn]

[0.85Yn0.95Yn]

R8

[1.05Yn1.15Yn]

[0.85Yn0.95Yn]

C2

[1.10Yn1.20Yn]

[0.80Yn0.90Yn]

Yn is the nominal value.


Table 2. Nominal and fault value with tolerance.

Fault
ID
F0
F1
F2
F3

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of a leapfrog filer circuit.

To identify the incipient faults of the leapfrog filter


circuit, the fault interval for each faulty component is
set to near its normal tolerance range.
The fault intervals for all faulty components are
listed in Table 1. Traditionally, during simulation, the
fault value of the faulty components was usually set to
be a fixed value, and as a result, the fault dictionary
established through this method is incomplete and has
substantial deviation from the actual situation. To
solve this problem, the mean value with tolerance
method which is named as MVT is proposed. Faulty
component R1 is used as an example to illustrate the
basic idea of MVT. According to Fig.3 and Table 1,
the fault interval is [10.5K, 11.5K] when the fault
value of R1 becomes larger. Then, the mean value of
the
fault
interval
is
calculated
as
m=

Fault
Class
NF
R
R
R

Nominal
Value

Fault
Value

Tolerance

10K
10K
10K

11K
9K
11K

f4.5%
f5.5%
f4.5%

F4

R

10K

9K

f5.5%

F5
F6
F7
F8
F9
F10
F11
F12

R
R
R
R
R
R
C2
C2

10K
10K
10K
10K
10K
10K
20nF
20nF

11K
9K
11K
9K
11K
9K
23nF
20nF

f4.5%
f5.5%
f4.5%
f5.5%
f4.5%
f5.5%
f4.5%
f5.5%

To obtain the simulation fault data according to the


fault classes in Table 2, a time-domain transient
analysis and a Monte Carlo analysis method in
OrCAD/Pspice 10.5 software are used. In the timedomain transient analysis, run-to-time and maximum
step size are set as 3 ms and 1us respectively. In the
Monte Carlo analysis, number of runs and use
distribution are set to 600 and Gaussian respectively.
Therefore, the simulated data for each fault class
(including F0) are 600 sets. In each set, there are 3000
points in the time-domain transient response curve.
To obtain the high classification accuracy for each
binary classifier whilst reducing the physical size of




The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

by MD based on PSO with a single feature vector used


to train LSSVM. The training sets and testing sets
which consist of 50, 100, 200, 250 and 300 samples for
each fault class are used respectively. The comparison
results of classification accuracy are shown in Fig.5.
From Fig.5, our proposed approach has higher
classification accuracy than the traditional a single
feature vector used to train LSSVM. It demonstrates
that each SVM binary classifier has different
classification accuracy for different feature vectors.
x
The consuming time of selecting feature
vectors based on MD using PSO and the exhaustive
method is shown in Fig.6 respectively. In Fig.6, time is
measured in seconds. Based on Fig.6, the near-optimal
feature vectors selected by MD based on PSO
consumed about 1/57 as much time as the optimal
feature vectors selected by the exhaustive method. In
other words, the consuming time of the near-optimal
feature vectors selected by MD based on PSO is
reduced about 98% in comparison to the time of the
optimal feature vectors selected by the exhaustive
method.

feature vector, some form of feature selection that is


capable of selecting the most significant features of a
feature set must be used. The MD based on PSO
discussed in Section IV is used in this paper for feature
selection. The statistical property features such as
range, mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis,
entropy and centroid of 50 test samples from class F0
and F1 for the leapfrog filter shown in Fig.4 are used
as an example to illustrate the feature selection
necessity. According to Fig.4, it can be seen that the
most significant feature of class F0 and F1 is the
centroid. The class F0 and F1 can be classified
accurately only based on the centroid while the other
features are redundant. Therefore, selecting the most
significant features of a feature set is necessary. The
feature selection procedure of the MD based on PSO is
has been given in Fig. 2. The result shows that the
near-optimal feature vector for class F0 and F1 are
kurtosis and centroid while the optimal feature is
centroid. Though the optimal feature vector for class
F0 and F1 is not selected, the dimensions of the
original feature vector have decreased by 5. Therefore,
the MD based on PSO for feature selection is
reasonable and acceptable.

98

mean

10
8
6

std
skewness
kurtosis
entropy

Near-optimal feature vectors


A single feature vector

94

0.2
0
-3
x 10

0.04 0

centroid

96

0.4

10

20

30

40

Accuracy(%)

Range

F0
F1

50

92
90
88

10

20

30

40

50

86

0.03
0.02
3.5 0

10

20

30

40

50

10

20

30

40

50

10

20

30

40

50

10

20

30

40

50

84
50

3
2.5
0
14

100
150
200
250
samples for each fault class

300

Fig. 5. Diagnostic accuracy based on the near-optimal


feature vectors and a single feature vector
respectively.

12
10
0
2.9

ICEMI2013

T ime(s)

2.88
2.86
65 0

4190
5000

60
55

4000
0

10

20
30
50 test samples

40

3000

50

2000

73.406

1000

Fig. 4. Statistical property feature for F0 and F1 of the


leapfrog filter.

We want to illustrate the advantages of our


proposed approach in two aspects. The details are as
follows:
x
We compare the average classification
accuracy of the near-optimal feature vectors selected

MD based on PSO

Exhaustive

Fig. 6. Consuming time of the near-optimal feature vectors


selected by MD based on PSO and the optimal
feature vectors selected by the exhaustive method




The 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments

The classification accuracy for each fault class


(including F0) is shown in Table 3.

[3]

Table 3. Classification accuracy for each fault class.


Fault ID
F0
F1
F2
F3
F4
F5
F6
F7
F8
F9
F10
F11
F12

Fault
Class
NF
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
C2
C2
Average

[4]

Accuracy (%)
92.50
98.00
98.00
95.00
96.00
96.33
90.83
98.67
96.33
100.00
92.40
88.50
93.20
95.06

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

ICEMI2013

based on LDA and HMM[J]. Circuit, Systems, and Signal


Processing,2010,29(4):577-600.
DENG Y, SHI Y B, ZHANG W. Diagnostic of incipient
faults in nonlinear analog circuits[J]. Metrology and
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ZHANG Y, WEI X Y, JIANG H F. One-class classifier
based on SBT for analog circuit fault diagnosis[J].
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statistics[C]. in Proceedings of the national institute of
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identification for electronic products using Mahalanobis
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KONDAGUNTURI R, BRADLEY E, MAGGARD K, et
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testing[C]. Southeastcon, 1999:217-220.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
A near-optimal feature vector selected by MD
based on PSO has been proposed for diagnostics of
the incipient faults in analog circuits using LSSVM.
Through the simulation results for the three filters
with parametric faults, we can draw the following
conclusions:
The accuracy using the near-optimal feature

vectors is better than the accuracy
using a single vector.
The consuming time of the near-optimal feature
vectors selected by MD based PSO is reduced about
98% in comparison to the time of the optimal feature
vectors selected by the exhaustive method
The proposed method provides a tradeoff between
diagnostic accuracy and time for diagnostics of the
incipient faults in analog circuits, which is beneficial
for analog IC or circuits testing and diagnosis.

Li Min: PhD candidate in the University of Electronic


Science and Technology of China (UESTC). His current
research interests include diagnostics, prognostics for circuits
and systems.
Long Bing : received MS from Harbin Engineering
University in 2002, and PhD from Harbin Institute of
Technology in 2005, respectively. Now he is an associate
professor at the University of Electronic Science and
Technology of China (UESTC). He served as a general
secretary & publication chair in IEEE ICTD09. In recent years,
he has published more than 60 scholarly papers, and reported 8
patent declarations in China. His current research interests
include failure analysis, automatic testing, diagnostics,
prognostics and health management, and testability design and
analysis for circuits and systems.
Xian Weiming: MS candidate in the University of
Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). His
current research interests include diagnostics, prognostics for
circuits and systems.
Wang Houjun: received MS and PhD in information and
signal processing from the University of Electronics Science
and Technology of China (UESTC) in 1985 and 1992,
respectively. He is currently a professor and has been a vice
president of UESTC from 2005. His research interests include
time domain measurement and signal processing, design for
testability of complex systems, architecture of auto test systems,
and fault diagnosis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grants 61071029,
60934002, 61271035 and 61201009, and in part by the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
under Grants ZYGX2012J088.

REFERENCES
[1] DAI J, DAS D, PECHT M. Prognostic-based risk
mitigation for telecom equipment under free air cooling
conditions[J]. Energy, v2012,99(4):423-429.
[2] XU L, HUANG J, WANG H, et al. A novel method for
the diagnosis of the incipient faults in analog circuits




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