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

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Laying Out the PCB Artwork

If you think Microsoft Visio is only good for doing flowcharts, organizational charts, or floor plans using its supplied stencils, I hope the earlier layout drawing will change your mind set. As far as I'm concerned, Visio does a pretty amazing job with 2D technical illustrations.

I won't go into details in my blog on describing the Visio workspace, how to configure its initial settings (user and developer modes, ruler and grids, guide lines and guide points, font, text, line and fill styles, etc.), the various quick maneuvering tricks (zooming, panning, scrolling) and manipulating objects (aligning, distributing, arraying, sizing and positioning). These are all covered adequately in my book.

For simplicity's sake, I use a simple example to illustrate the steps involved in creating a PCB layout of a SCSI host adapter, as shown below:


There are four specific steps to creating the PCB layout:

1. Prepare the drawing page
2. Draw the PCB outline
3. Create the component layout symbols
4. Populate the PCB

Each of these steps are also detailed in my book so that you'll be able to replicate exactly what I've drawn, using the X-Y coordinates and the size and position properties of each object that you create, including the SCSI connector itself. As you work through the exercises, you'll come to appreciate the beauty of breaking down a seemingly complex object into basic building blocks, and then assembling them together. You will also be taught how to create sophisticated objects such as the various SMT ICs (PLCC and its socket) and their footprints in a later part of the chapter.

You'll learn the trick of creating impressive PCB layout illustrations that are professional to look at and captivate your audience in your report presentation.
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)