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

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Content at a Glance

Frequent visitors of my blog will already have a foretaste of the various sample pages of my upcoming book, PCB-RE:Tools & Techniques. The completed book now stands at 368 pages with seven main contributors taking up about 40% of the content, and the remaining 60% contributed by me. For a sneak preview, here's the table of content:



There are a total of three sections and an appendices:

The first section introduces the fundamentals of PCB-RE and also an expanded treatment of the manual approach for digital, analog, mixed-signals and power supplies, less the Microsoft Visio stuff in my first book. The second section focuses on the various tools and techniques used by the PCB-RE industry, and the third section provides interesting and useful resources such as DIY projects, short write-ups on PCB-RE related freewares, as well as more information on PCB-RE equipment and their vendors.

There are five appendices, each serving different purposes with relevant materials and references that should give the PCB-RE topic a run for your time and money, if you expend the effort to go through them.

There are plenty of nice photos and top quality illustrations, interspersed with rich, juicy footnotes and some fun anecdotes (as usual).

Well, hopefully you're all geared up to get a copy when it is released in probably two weeks' time or less.

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