Identification of Simultaneous Soft Faults in Analog Circuits Using a Hybrid PSO-Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Analog circuits are fundamental to a wide range of industrial systems, where their evaluation is essential for ensuring operational reliability and preventing system failures. However, diagnostic methodologies for analog circuits are markedly less developed than those for their digital counterparts, primarily due to the inherent difficulty of detecting soft faults within analog environments. One particularly challenging category of faults involves simultaneous degradations across multiple components that do not result in a hard failure of the circuit. Indeed, there is a notable lack of studies addressing the detection of simultaneous soft faults in analog circuits. This study proposes a method for identifying this type of soft fault occurrence in analog circuits by combining Machine Learning (ML) techniques, specifically Random Forests and Artificial Neural Networks, with an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The proposed approach is validated on a second-order Sallen-Key band-pass filter, a circuit in which soft fault classification is particularly challenging. Furthermore, the study highlights the performance improvements achieved through the proposed combined method in detecting and classifying simultaneous soft faults. This study demonstrates that an iterative process combining ML and EA techniques enables accurate fault prediction in electronic circuits. Moreover, the integration of these strategies can enhance the performance of classification problems that are traditionally addressed using either ML or EA in isolation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using several statistical metrics, including the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), F1-score, and others.