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, January 30, 2018

Another 5-Star Review

Here's another 5-star review for PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques from Jeremy Hong, a bright and promising student at Wright State University who is also a hardware design and reverse engineer himself:


There are currently only two books that comprehensively cover the niche topic of PCB-RE. Both of these books are authored by Mr. Ng, this is his second book. His first book is a great example of a well documented process of PCB-RE and this book covers fundamentals, tools, and other techniques. 
One chapter in particular, "Manual Override", briefly and concisely describes the fundamentals that design engineers adhere to when laying out a board. Coming from a design background myself, I really appreciated his explanations of layout rules and the constraints that design engineers are faced with. The chapter practically describes my design experience with mixed signal PCBs and it was spot on! I credit my previous design experience with my ability to RE PCBs. I believe that hardware/embedded reverse engineers that don't come from a design background should read this section carefully. It should provide some valuable insight to find interesting test points, debug interfaces, interactions and relationships between digital and analog signals. Also in the book is a very useful chapter dedicated to JTAG. There are chapters dedicated to high-end tools, that I didn't even know existed! I'm still trying to get over the chapter on ScanCAD and how it works. The resources section has some great references and DIY ideas/projects. The PCB-RE equipment and vendors almost reads like a wishlist to me... 
Overall, I found this book to be super useful and it will probably be on my bench more than on a bookshelf. If you are doing this kind of work on a daily basis, like me, you are definitely going to be writing notes, marking up the pages, and putting bookmarks everywhere. I think students, enthusiasts and engineers looking for a career change will certainly take away something from this book.

This book is the culmination of experiences from different industry experts and engineers, and even I myself have benefited from collating and editing their writings and contributions, per se. I'm sure there is something useful for everyone engaged in this niche skillset, whether you're doing it the manual way or with the help of advanced equipment.

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