Correct incipient identification of an analog circuit fault is conducive to the health of the analog circuit, yet very difficult. In this paper, a novel approach to analog circuit incipient fault identification is presented. Time responses are acquired by sampling outputs of the circuits under test, and then the responses are decomposed by the wavelet transform in order to generate energy features. Afterwards, lower-dimensional features are produced through the kernel entropy component analysis as samples for training and testing a one-against-one least squares support vector machine. Simulations of the incipient fault diagnosis for a Sallen-Key band-pass filter and a two-stage four-op-amp bi-quad low-pass filter demonstrate the diagnosing procedure of the proposed approach, and also reveal that the proposed approach has higher diagnosis accuracy than the referenced methods.

Power electronic circuits (PECs) are prone to various failures, whose classification is of paramount importance. This paper presents a data-driven based fault diagnosis technique, which employs a support vector data description (SVDD) method to perform fault classification of PECs. In the presented method, fault signals (e.g. currents, voltages, etc.) are collected from accessible nodes of circuits, and then signal processing techniques (e.g. Fourier analysis, wavelet transform, etc.) are adopted to extract feature samples, which are subsequently used to perform offline machine learning. Finally, the SVDD classifier is used to implement fault classification task. However, in some cases, the conventional SVDD cannot achieve good classification performance, because this classifier may generate some so-called refusal areas (RAs), and in our design these RAs are resolved with the one-against-one support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The obtained experiment results from simulated and actual circuits demonstrate that the improved SVDD has a classification performance close to the conventional one-against-one SVM, and can be applied to fault classification of PECs in practice.