Diagnostic system based on support-vector machines for board-level functional diagnosis

Fault diagnosis is critical for improving product yield and reducing manufacturing cost. However, it is very challenging to identify the root cause of failures on a complex circuit board. Ambiguous diagnosis results lead to long debug times and even wrong repair actions, which significantly increases the repair cost. We propose an automatic diagnostic system using support vector machines (SVMs). The proposed system acquires debug knowledge from empirical data; this strategy avoids the difficulties involved in knowledge acquisition in traditional fault diagnosis methods. SVMs provide an optimal separating hyperplane in classification. The optimal solution and generalization ability of SVMs lead to higher diagnostic accuracy, compared to the classical learning approaches such as artificial neural networks (ANNs). An industrial board is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the SVMs-based diagnostic system provides quantifiable improvement over current diagnostic software and an ANN-based diagnostic system.