Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book:
Despite the high cost and challenges involved, companies and individuals engage in PCB-RE for the following reasons:
Despite the high cost and challenges involved, companies and individuals engage in PCB-RE for the following reasons:
1. Re-create the schematic diagram, in part or full, for repair
2. Recover the Gerber data for PCB reproduction
3. Re-design the board to circumvent obsolete parts
The first instance applies to repair technicians and agencies that carry out repair of PCBs without any proper documentation, probably from customers who are end-users and not the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), who may have limited recourse either because the OEM is no longer in business or supporting its end-of-life products, or charges a high premium for repair.
Similarly, a PCB may go out of production resulting in not enough new or refurbished stock in the market to keep existing system operational for another five years. In such cases, the customer may be forced to reproduce the PCB by sacrificing a few bad boards to re-construct the layered artworks for reproduction purpose.
Obsolescence is one major issue faced by the commercial and military alike. PCB designers do not have the ability to predict whether parts used in their design will go out of production or stock for whatever reason.1 Consequently, customers may find themselves in a tight spot when a failed component is no longer available and thus unable to replace it, rendering the faulty board useless.
PCB-RE then becomes a viable option to re-construct the schematics to facilitate re-design works, doing away with the use of obsolete components and replacing with parts that are more readily available. This is usually done without firsthand knowledge of the OEM since there might be possible infringements of intellectual property rights. The legal risks though, is negligible if the re-designed PCBs are meant only for internal consumption and not for external sales to make a profit.
From doing it manually on an ad hoc basis to full-scale automation with reproduction in mind, PCB-RE is increasingly becoming an indispensable discipline in the PCB repair and refurbish industry. The fast-changing market and shortening design-to-product cycles will only see higher demands for such services and practices, not-withstanding the idiosyncrasies and stigma that is attached to this peculiar trade which everyone seems to be doing but no one wants to admit it.
Hi:
ReplyDeleteI just started a job this month which requires to RE some functions on a RC controller which has a artosyn AR 8001 and AR8003 chip on them but I am unable to find the datasheet on the internet. Any idea to approach this?
The AR8001/AR8003 are a complimentary pair of image transmission modules customed parts by the Chinese company Artosyn Microelectronics. It is therefore unlikely you'll find any datasheet online for these two chips, especially if the company only sells their drone products and not the standalone ICs.
ReplyDeleteIf you're doing PCB-RE just to understand the design, or to produce similar products, the only workable way is backward signal annotations:
1. Treat the AR8001/AR8003 as black boxes
2. Locate pin 1 as reference
3. Find out the power and ground pins
4. Trace out the address, data and control pins using known ICs or onboard CPU
5. Since these are image transmission chips, look out for video amplifiers and trace their pins back to these ICs.
Hope the above pointers will give you something to work on.