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

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

My Personal Story (Part 3)

You can see from the photo that the infrared matrix sub-assembly is quite a big board with a rectangular cutout in the middle for an array of horizontal (40) and vertical (30) pairs of infrared emitter and sensor diodes. These fit nicely around the tinted bezel display frame in which the brightly orange-lit plasma display of the display driver sub-assembly shows through.


The infrared matrix sub-assembly (top view)                                              Layout drawing

If you work often on surface-mounted or mixed PCBs, you'll notice that apart from the ICs and bigger component parts, the miniature SMT resistors, capacitors, and even semi-conductors such as the SOT package3 diodes and transistors may not have reference designators assigned to them on the silkscreen layer, and this is expected with densely populated SMT boards due to the difficulty and impracticality of doing so. The book explores how to give these nameless discrete devices their reference designators to facilitate the drawing of the schematic diagrams.

To cut the story short, in total I spent about a month drafting the parts list, gathering the datasheets, creating my first collection of Visio symbols for both the layout and schematic entities, drawing the PCB layout, and finally tracing out the schematic diagram.

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