Circuit state analysis using chaotic signal excitation

A new testing method for analog circuit is proposed in this paper. A low-pass Butterworth filter is taken as the typical system under test (SUT) since the analog circuits in different types of electronic systems can be regarded as the low-, band- or high-pass active (passive) filters. The chaotic signal, which is generated by an improved Chua's circuit, is employed as the excitation signal of SUT. The SUT is a “narrowband” system compared with the bandwidth of input signal, whose state is analyzed with an error-tracking approach. The experimental result depicts that this testing method can efficiently detect the change of the circuit parameter. Besides, another eight features are extracted from the output signal of SUT for analyzing the SUT states. A discussion is made for comparing the effectiveness of each feature according to the testing results.