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

Thursday, July 13, 2017

My Upcoming Book...

The past couple of weeks I have been busy with my next book, PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques. It is a sequel to my first engineering book, The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering. Those of you who bought it will have learnt that it is a book on doing PCB-RE the manual way using Microsoft Visio as the diagramming tool of choice for properly documenting the process from start to finish.

Well, the focus of this sequel book is different. Much, much different. It is meant to give the PCB-RE practice a more complete treatment by addressing the tools and techniques used by industry experts and practitioners, and covers topics like PCB deconstruction, flying probes, ScanCAD, JTAG, clip-and-learn, Chip-off forensics and X-ray. And it will not be a one-man effort this time because I have enlisted the help of a number of highly experienced people to contribute their knowledge in the area they're good at. It will be a one-of-it's-kind book on PCB-RE. For sure!

In case you're curious, here is the front cover of the book:



For once, I get to be both the author and editor-in-charge, like John Black in his voluminous book, The System Engineer's Handbook. You will get to know the various authors in the Contribution List, the Acknowledgment, and at the end of each chapter they contributed. There are three sections to the book: Fundamentals, Tools & Techniques, Resources and an Appendix that is informative in itself.

That's all I have to say for now. If you've not gotten a copy of The Art of PCB-RE, then perhaps it's time you do, in anticipation of the sequel to it. ;)

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