To My Readers



If this is the first time you're visiting my blog, thank you. Whether you're interested or just curious to find out about PCB reverse engineering (PCB-RE), I hope you'll find something useful here.

This blog contains many snippets of the content in my books to provide a more detailed overall sampling for my would-be readers to be better informed before making the purchase. Of course, the book contains more photos and nice illustrations, as evidence from its cover page. Hopefully, this online trailer version will whet your appetite enough to want to get a copy for yourself.

Top Review

I started doing component level repair of electronics with (and without) schematics more than 40 years ago, which activity often involves reverse-engineering of printed circuit boards. Although over the years my technical interests have shifted into particle beam instrumentation, electron microscopy, and focused ion beam technology fields, till this day——and more often than not——PCB repairs have returned multiple multi-million-dollar accelerators, FIB, and SEM instruments back to operation, delivering great satisfaction and some profit.

Many of the methods described by Keng Tiong in great details are similar to the approaches I've developed, but some of the techniques are different, and as effective and useful as efficient and practical. Systematic approach and collection of useful information presented in his books are not only invaluable for a novice approaching PCB-level reverse engineering, but also very interesting reading and hands-on reference for professionals.

Focus on reverse engineering instead of original design provides unique perspective into workings of electronics, and in my opinion books by Keng Tiong (I've got all three of them) are must-read for anybody trying to develop good understanding of electronics——together with writings by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, Phil Hobbs, Jim Williams, Bob Pease, Howard Johnson and Martin Graham, Sam Goldwasser, and other world's top electronics experts.

Valery Ray
Particle Beam Systems Technologist

Monday, March 6, 2017

My Personal Story (Part 2)

The next consideration was what CAD software to use for this endeavor. It so happened that there's an old copy of Visio Technical 4.5 lying around, so I installed and fired it up to do some fiddling around. It made an instant connection that persuaded me this was the best tool for the job! The first thing I did was produce a mechanical drawing of the front panel, as shown below, which took me just slightly over half an hour. Not bad for a start, eh?

The rear view of the unit was more complicated with the CPU board and the display driver sub-assembly visibly in view, but I managed to draw that too though at a much later date when I had the time to do so. However, I will not be showing it here since that is not the main focus of the story. Still, I'm sure you'll agree that Visio fared pretty well for illustration purposes (and we're just warming up!).

After disassembling the unit, I proceeded to analyze the infrared matrix sub-assembly and gathered whatever information I could find on its components. What intrigued me was the primitive yet beautiful design of this multi-layered PCB—the making use of narrow-angled beam infrared emitter and sensor diode pairs—to achieve the X and Y coordinates mapping for the touchscreen effect that was the usual practice back in the mid-1990 era. It had many of the elements that made reverse engineering particularly interesting and challenging, such as the peculiar shape and size of the PCB, the presence of through-hole and surface-mount components that are mounted on both sides, and the thick conformal coating. That's quite a handful for my virgin attempt but I went ahead anyway.

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