2018 3rd International Conference on Mechanical, Control and Computer Engineering

A Fault Dictionary Method for the Diagnosis of

Catastrophic Faults Using Power Supply Current

Chaojie Zhang, Xionglong Pan, Guo He, Jiankeng Yu

College of Power Engineering
Naval University of Engineering
717 Jiefang Street, Wuhan, Hubei, China
zcjdoctor@126.com, paxilo619@163.com, chokie001@126.com, 454175938@qq.com

Abstract—Fault diagnosis of analog circuits is still more difficult
than fault diagnosis of digital circuits. It is a bottleneck in the
development of electronic circuits. Catastrophic faults are the
major failures of analog circuits. Output voltage is traditionally
used to diagnose analog circuits. A new signal, named dynamic
power supply current is proposed for fault diagnosis of analog
circuits in this paper. And an AC fault dictionary method is
presented. Firstly, the dynamic power supply current of analog
circuits is sampled under an ac input stimulus. Then eight fault
features of power supply current are extracted. These fault
features include four features in time-domain and four features
in frequency-domain. Secondly, the ambiguity sets of every fault
feature are built and every ambiguity set is assigned with an
integer code. Thirdly, these fault features and potential faults are
used to construct the integer-coded fault dictionary. The elements
of fault dictionary are the integer codes. This fault dictionary can
be used to diagnose the circuits-under-test. As an example, the
proposed method was used for fault diagnosis of a band-pass
filter. We diagnosed this filter using the dynamic power supply
current and the traditional output voltage, respectively. The
diagnosis results of two kind of signals were compared. The
comparing results indicate that the dynamic power supply
current is suitable for fault diagnosis of analog circuits.
Keywords- dynamic power supply current; analog circuits; fault
dictionary; catastrophic fault; fault diagnosis
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, we have seen a rapid increase in the use of
electronic circuits. The mobile devices, multimedia devices,
monitoring devices and other areas demand for various
electronic circuits. Fault diagnosis of electronic circuits has
been an active research topic in the past three decades [1-9].
Although the analog circuits came into being long before the
advent of digital circuits, fault diagnosis of analog circuits is
still more difficult than fault diagnosis of digital circuits.
Analog fault diagnosis needs more time and more total cost,
and is a bottleneck in the development of electronic circuits [1-
5].
Catastrophic faults (sometimes called hard faults) are the
major failures of circuits. They occur about 80-90 percent of all
analog faults in practice [3]. There are two kinds of
catastrophic faults: stuck-open fault and stuck-short fault. A
stuck-open fault is a kind of fault that the component terminals
are out of contact with the rest of the circuit and create a high
resistance when the fault occurs in the circuit. A stuck-short
fault is a short between terminals of the component (effectively
shorting out the component from the circuit).
A number of research works have been targeted to diagnose
analog circuits [2-7]. Earlier researches often use the signals of
node voltages. They assume that a large number of circuit
nodes are accessible. For the integrated circuits, only few nodes
can be tested. So, we need to find other new accessible signal
except for the traditional voltage signal. The power supply
nodes are the universal nodes of any circuit. The current signal
which passes the power node is always accessible. This signal
provides valuable information for fault diagnosis of analog
circuits, because a fault may change the amount of current and
its flow in the power supply bus. The dynamic power supply
current has been used to diagnose digital circuits successfully
[10-11].
In this paper, the dynamic power supply current is used for
fault diagnosis of analog circuits. The current signal of power
node is acquired when an ac stimulus is used as the input signal
of the circuits. Then we extract the fault features of power
supply current. The fault features in both time-domain and
frequency-domain are analyzed and used to construct the fault
dictionary. An integer-coded faulty-wise dictionary method is
used to locate the fault of circuits-under-test (CUT). The fault
features analysis of power supply current and the integer-coded
faulty-wise dictionary method are described in Section II. We
use these methods to diagnose a band-pass filter in Section III.
The diagnosis results are compared with those using the
traditional voltage signal. Conclusions are given in Section IV.
II. FAULT FEATURES AND AC FAULT DICTIONARY
METHOD
A. Fault Features analysis of Power Supply Current
The power supply current of an analog circuit depends on
the input signal and the state of the circuit (fault-free or faulty).
In this paper, we measure the dynamic power supply current
passing through the VDD pin under an ac input stimuli. Figure
1 shows a dynamic power supply current signal. In order to
diagnose analog circuits using this signal, we need to extract
proper fault features which can distinguish the different states
of circuit. The features both in time-domain and frequency-
domain are extracted and used for fault diagnosis in this

978-1-5386-8481-8/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 295

DOI 10.1109/ICMCCE.2018.00067
research. The selected features of power supply current are that
the maximum value V1, the minimum value V2, the mean value
V3 and the standard deviation V4 in time domain and the
magnitude component values of the first four harmonics in
frequency domain, which donated as V5, V6, V7, V8.
8 feature are independent and can be coded using the same
7.5
7
Current（mA）
fault features. Its rows include all the potential faults (include
the fault-free state), and its columns include the fault features.
Every fault feature has one or more ambiguity sets. For a fault
feature, an integer code is assigned to each ambiguity set. The
same integer code represents the faults which belong to the
same ambiguity set of a fault feature. Since different fault
features are independent, the ambiguity sets of each fault
integers without confusion. By this way, an integer-coded fault
dictionary can be constructed. Table I shows the integer-coded
fault dictionary derived from the fault features of Figure 2.

6.5

6
TABLE I. AN INTEGER-CODED FAULT DICTIONARY DERIVED FROM
5.5 FIGURE 2
5 Fault Features
4.5
Faults
V1 V2 V3 V4
4
3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 8 f1 1 1 1 1
t（ms） Integer
f2 1 1 2 1
Figure 1. Dynamic power supply current signal of a fault-free circuit Code
f3 2 2 3 1

Measurement ambiguity often occurs and is difficult to f4 3 3 3 2

solve in fault diagnosis of analog circuits. Different faults may
result in similar fault features which are close to each other. So,
it is difficult to clearly distinguish these faults because of the
common presence of component tolerance. Figure 2 presents 4
fault features of dynamic power supply current for 6 states of
an analog circuit (include the fault-free state and 5 faulty states).
The values of fault feature V1 for faults f1 and f2 are similar and
they are difficult to distinguish. An ambiguity set is defined as
a list of faults which have similar values for a given fault
feature [1]. Therefore, the fault feature V1 of Figure 2 has four
ambiguity sets: {f1, f2}, {f3}, {f4}, and {f5, f6}. The fault feature
V2 has three ambiguity sets: {f1, f2}, {f3, f5}, and {f4, f6}. The
fault feature V3 has four ambiguity sets: {f1}, {f2}, {f3, f4}, and
{f5, f6}. The fault feature V4 has two ambiguity sets: {f1, f2, f3}
and {f4, f5, f6}. If an ambiguity set has only one fault, the fault
can be uniquely distinguished by this fault feature. If an
ambiguity set has two or more faults, these faults cannot be
uniquely distinguished by this fault feature.
f5 4 2 4 2
f6 4 3 4 2
The integer-coded fault dictionary can be thought as an
array. If all the rows of this array are different, it means that
every fault can be uniquely distinguished. If some of the faults
have the same rows, it means that these faults cannot be
uniquely distinguished and they form an ambiguity set of the
analog circuits. For a CUT, its power supply current under the
same ac input stimuli is sampled and the 8 fault features are
extracted, too. Every fault feature can be coded according to
the coding rule of ambiguity sets shown in Figure 2. The 8 fault
features’ codes will be a vector. If the vector is the same as
some row of the integer-coded fault dictionary, the
corresponding fault of this row is the fault type of CUT.
III. SAMPLE CIRCUITS AND RESULTS
A. Sample Circuits

Figure 2. Fault features of dynamic power supply current and their

ambiguity sets

B. AC Fault Dictionary Method

The power supply current of analog circuit under an ac
input stimuli is a dynamic signal. The fault features both in
time-domain and frequency-domain can be used for fault
diagnosis. For a particular fault feature, the two or more faults
in the same ambiguity set could not be uniquely distinguished.
But they may be uniquely distinguished by using another fault
feature. So, we should use the information of many fault
features. Fault dictionary is a collection of potential faults and Figure 3. Example analog filter

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 In order to validate the proposed method, we applied it to the fault types can be uniquely distinguished by using the
the filter shown in Figure 3. This filter is a band-pass filter and dynamic power supply current.
is used widely in many areas, such as electronic circuits of
monitoring system. The nominal values for the components
which result in a center frequency of 1 kHz are shown in Figure
3, too. A 2V(p-p), 1 kHz sinusoidal wave source is applied as
an input signal. The power supplies for this circuit are a 12V
DC and a -12V DC. We can sample one of the dynamic current
which passes through the 12V DC or the -12V DC. Firstly, the
dynamic power supply current of the -12V DC power is used to
diagnose this filter. The catastrophic faults of all the resisters
and capacitors are the potential faults, which are shown in
Table II. ‘S’ and ‘O’ stand for stuck-short and stuck-open,
respectively. ‘Nor’ stands for the fault-free state. For examples,
Figure 4 and 5 shows waves of the dynamic power supply
current when the filter has faults R3O and C2S, respectively.
Figure 6. Ambiguity sets and their integer codes for fault features of
dynamic power supply current

TABLE II. POTENTIAL FAULTS OF THE FILTER AND THE AC FAULT

DICTIONARY
Current（mA）

Fault Features
Faults
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8
Nor f0 3 2 2 5 4 2 5 8
R1O f1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
R1S f2 7 5 6 7 7 2 0 0
R2O f3 6 4 5 6 4 3 9 7
R2S f4 4 4 4 5 5 1 4 4
R3O f5 2 1 2 5 4 2 7 9 Int
R3S f6 7 6 7 5 1 1 2 8 eg
Figure 4. Wave of the dynamic power supply current when the filter has er
R4O f7 5 6 5 2 3 1 4 3
fault R3O
R4S f8 7 6 7 4 1 1 2 6 Co
f9 de
R5O 3 4 3 3 4 1 6 5
R5S f10 6 3 5 5 2 1 4 2
R6O f11 5 4 4 5 4 1 9 7
R6S f12 5 4 4 6 6 1 4 6
C1O f13 2 1 2 5 4 2 8 9
Current（mA）

C1S f14 4 4 4 5 5 1 4 3
C2O f15 3 1 2 5 4 1 3 2
C2S f16 2 1 2 5 4 2 7 8

C. Comparing With Output Voltage Signal

Figure 5. Wave of the dynamic power supply current when the filter has
fault C2S
B. Fault Diagnosis using dynamic power supply current
The fault features of dynamic power supply current were
extracted. Their corresponding ambiguity sets are presented in
Figure 6. The integer-coded fault dictionary can be constructed
according to these ambiguity sets and their integer codes. Table
II is the integer-coded fault dictionary of power supply current.
It can be used to diagnose the faults of CUT. From Table II, we
can see that the row are different each other. It means that all
In this section, the traditional output voltage signal is used
to diagnose the same filter and the results are compared with
those using the power supply current. The output voltage of the
filter is sampled when the input stimulus is the same 1kHz
sinusoidal wave source. And the same 8 fault features
described in Section II are extracted. The ambiguity sets and
their corresponding integer codes for fault features of output
voltage are presented in Figure 7. The integer-coded fault
dictionary is shown in Table III. From Table III, we can see
that the rows corresponding to Nor, R1S, R2O, R2S, R3S, R4O,
R4S, R5S, R6O, C2O are different with other rows. So, these
10 kinds of fault types (include the fault-free state) can be
uniquely distinguished. Other 7 kinds of fault types cannot be
uniquely distinguished. They fall into two ambiguity sets:
{R1O, R5O, R6S, C2S} and {R3O, C1O, C2S}. The faults in
the same ambiguity set will be confused when this filter is
diagnosed using the output voltage signal. All the faults can be

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uniquely distinguished when the power supply current signal is value, the minimum value, the mean value and the standard
used. So, the dynamic power supply current is valid for fault deviation in time domain and the magnitude component values
diagnosis of analog circuits. This signal contains information of the first four harmonics in frequency domain. Every fault
related with the circuits’ topology and can be tested for fault feature has one or more ambiguity sets. For a fault feature, an
diagnosis of analog circuits. integer code is assigned to each ambiguity set. An ac integer-
coded fault dictionary can be constructed by using these integer
codes. For a new CUT, the dynamic power supply current can
be sampled and its eight fault features are extracted. Then these
fault features are used to diagnose the CUT by comparing with
the rows of fault dictionary. The proposed method was used to
diagnose a band-pass filter. The results were compared with
those using the traditional output voltage. All the faults shown
in Table II can be uniquely distinguished when we use the
power supply current signal. But 7 kinds of fault types cannot
be uniquely distinguished when the output signal was used.
These fault types fall into two ambiguity sets: {R1O, R5O, R6S,
C2S} and {R3O, C1O, C2S}. The two or more fault types in
the same ambiguity set will be confused.
Figure 7. Ambiguity sets and their integer codes for fault features of output
voltage ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge to the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant 51509255.
TABLE III. POTENTIAL FAULTS OF THE FILTER AND THE AC FAULT
DICTIONARY
Fault Features REFERENCES
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