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

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

5-Star Review from Down-Under

A 65-year-old reader from Australia by the name of Bob Dring, a retired engineer who has done much RE works, left this 5-star review on Amazon:


Books on this topic are as rare as hen's teeth.The first book The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering was mainly about RE techniques and ways to keep the extracted data organized. It was really well written and an enjoyable read. The latest book PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques is about the tools (hardware and software) that can be made or purchased to ease the RE process. Again it was just as well written and a good read. I've been doing RE for years mainly to help in the repair of undocumented products and yet I still found some very useful stuff in these two books. 
The reader should be aware that RE takes a lot of time and no book is going to be a magic bullet that will give instant results. However learning to be organized and to correctly document the results can be learned from these books and that means you get to waste less time. You can also reuse and expand a well documented partial RE when tackling a different fault on the same product. 
Have no fear of Mr Ng's English; it's really good!

Thanks for the strong endorsement on my books, Bob!

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