Abstract: The increasing requirements for cabling of complex electronic equipment such as aerospace systems and ship systems have increased the complexity of cable networks. As the cable usage time grows, the cable is susceptible to hard faults and intermittent faults due to electrical, chemical and mechanical stresses. The cable faults may lead to system faults and even accidents, thus affect the safety and reliability of the system. Based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, the spread spectrum time domain reflection method (SSTDR) is used to study the cable fault location method based on SSTDR. With this method the cable open circuit, short circuit and intermittent faults can be detected and the faults can be located to the fault points. A three-dimensional wire harness model is built by CATIA software. The fault points are created according to the wire information and highlighted in the wire harness model, which provides convenience for wire harness maintenance and improves maintenance efficiency.