A symbolic approach to the fault location in analog circuits

The increased complexity of electronic circuits due to technological improvement has caused the need of always more sophisticated testing and fault diagnosis methodologies. However, while for digital systems these methodologies have now reached full automation, for analog and mixed signal systems there is a lack of efficient and simple methods in this field. The aim of this work is to present a completely new methodology for the parametric fault diagnosis of linear analog circuits. The new method, which is based on the k-fault diagnosis hypothesis and takes into account tolerances and measurement errors, has been fully automated. The automatic fault diagnosis system has been developed by exploiting symbolic techniques, which permit a significant reduction in the computational complexity