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

Friday, March 3, 2017

Types of PCB

Printed circuit board (PCB) technology has seen a tremendous jump since its humble beginnings in the early 1900s. From simple discrete, single-sided through-hole to the complex fine-pitch, multi-layered surface-mounted board, the amount and density of components for a given PCB area have increased manifold while the overall size of PCBs have reduced substantially.


Such rapid advancements in PCB design not only present problems and difficulties to the test engineer who is responsible for writing test programs for the board, they also pose seemingly insurmountable challenges to those daring enough to re-create the schematic drawings. PCB reverse-engineering is indeed not for the uninitiated nor the faint-hearted. But for those who are willing to devote their time and energy to learn this art, the end results can be rewarding to say the least; it may even put you a cut above your fellow engineers because in the process of doing it, you not only unravel the beauty of the PCB itself, you actually gain engineering insights and ideas from the original designer's expertise and ingenuity on how a particular circuit is designed, how certain difficulties are overcome, as well as the sound practices and design techniques that are applied in the real world.
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