New RAMs, New Life!

The SDRAMs I ordered arrived sooner than expected. They are half the height of my original Kingston and Hynix modules:

Removed the existing two 1GB RAMs and plugged in the new ones into the EP35-DS3 motherboard, then powered up, held my breath and watched the PC booted up... Success! Just to be sure, I double-checked the RAM available:

Yep, it's there: 8GB worth of memory. A 10-year old desktop has been given a new lease of life. Let's hope it will last another 3-5 years...

5-Star Review from a PCB-RE Engineer

This morning I received a FB message from an engineer in Canada, expressing his appreciation for my sequel book. He was so impressed after reading it, he left a review on Amazon.ca:

I'm a professional reverse engineer by trade and have worked on many reverse engineering projects at ENA Electronics in Hamilton, Canada (a sample work can be found at the ENA Electronics website). Many of the techniques that are mentioned in this book we are already using long before the author put it together based on our own research and findings. BUT Keng Tiong did a remarkable job of pooling people from all over the industry and bringing their publications and research together in one place and putting the valuable content into one book. He took the initiative that many of us wished we could have done and made it happened.

I opened the book yesterday at 6 pm and read it through until midnight, I couldn't get enough of it! Finishing the book left me brimming with even more ideas and concepts that can be possibly put in place in a professional environment to ensure our customers receive the best quality service and support, making sure those legacy products last longer into the future. 

Hats off for the great work! I look forward to your follow-up in the trilogy!

Embedding Components in PCB

In recent years there have been discussions and papers on embedding components into printed circuit boards among manufacturers and designers alike. From a PCB designer's point of view, there are advantages to this approach, such as improved signal integrity due to shorter trace runs and smaller lead inductance resulting in reduced EMI. On the flip side, there are also challenges since current EDA tools lack support for this kind of design requirement in terms of component library and routing strategies. Manufacturers likewise face new difficulties implementing this new technology in PCB fabrication, most notably the need for major overhaul in their manufacturing process and equipment.

Doubtless, it will be the end-users or customers who will determine whether this new approach takes off or remain a novel idea on the drawing board. Those looking to protect their designs from hackers and reverse engineers will probably give it some consideration. However, in the long run, it will be the cost of maintenance and repair of these PCBs that will determine the outcome. Still, those of us in the PCB-RE business will need to keep an eye on its development; it may become a reality in the not too distant future, perhaps 3-5 years from now.

GA-EP35-DS3

I'm a DIY person, so it's not surprising that I prefer to setup my own PC by buying the parts and assembling them myself to the configuration that I wanted. Since the 386 era, I had assembled a couple of PCs and when they outgrew my needs, I'd upgrade the CPU, RAM, video card or simply assemble a new PC and give away the old PC to some needy students. My current PC is just over 10 years old now:

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 with an E8400 Intel Core 2 Duo processor and four 1GB DDR2 SDRAMs. The video card is an NVidia GF8600GT with 512MB RAM. The original 250GB hard drive running Windows XP had died and was replaced with a 500GB running Windows 7, followed by a 1TB running Windows 10 since mid last year.

Recently, my old trusty desktop PC started showing signs of aging. Sometimes it let out a long beep followed by a few short beeps as it power up and simply hangs; other times, it run through a series of POST, turns off and repeats the same sequence again. This usually goes away after I adjusted the video card and supported it with an ice-cream stick to keep it level since the motherboard is affixed to the chassis vertically. Yeah, it's a crude fix but hey, it works...

Anyway, two days ago when it booted up, I noticed that the reported RAM was 3GB instead of 4GB and realized that one of the SDRAM module is dead. This was confirmed when I swapped them and the PC just hanged and refuse to boot. In the end, I took out two of the modules and reduce the memory to just 2GB. Now it boots up normally.

I'm not about to throw my old workhorse away just yet since it still functions well. In fact, I decided to give it more muscle and ordered a set of four 2GB DDR2 SDRAM modules from eBay @ $20. It should arrive in two weeks time and hopefully, that will stretch the PC's usefulness another 3-5 years. That's the maximum memory capacity the motherboard can handle anyway.

Ps: I had the foresight to buy a motherboard that uses solid tantalum capacitors instead of the leaky electrolytic type. That ensures better durability and is now proven to be the best value for money decision I've made.

Trilogy to PCB-RE

As the dust settles over the release of PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques, I am thinking of writing the third and final installment to complete the trilogy on the PCB-RE subject. This third volume will discuss a real-world example of my successful attempt at reversing a whole electronic unit comprising three cards: an analog PCB, a digital PCB, and a mixed-signal PCB.

The book cover concept is shown below:

I'm not sure when I will start work on it, as I need to juggle my priorities and commitments. Probably will do some background work of organizing my materials when I find the time. Readers who have bought my two PCB-RE books, please read the back cover and leave your comments on what you'll like to see included in this upcoming book.

And oh, by the way, I'm also deliberating on who to write the Foreword (or whether there should be one anyway). If you know of anyone who is experienced in PCB-RE, kindly recommend. Thanks!

Hardware Virtualization

These days, virtual machines (VMs) are gaining popularity as legacy systems face obsolescence and the PC platform becomes more powerful. Hardware virtualization is an attempt to keep old software and OS running, albeit in a new and foreign system that emulates the hardware environment in which the binaries of the original systems operate. This is important, especially if the software is still required for a company or business to continue its day-to-day operation, when the legacy hardware no longer functions.

Some examples are VMware workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, Parallels Desktop for Mac, etc. With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft no longer supports its Virtual PC emulator and replaces that with the more sophisticated (and cumbersome) Hyper-V. Those wanting to emulate the DOS system and run old 16-bit DOS legacy programs, however, have the option of using DOSBox, a stable and popular implementation that runs well in the latest Windows OS. For others who wish to run earlier versions of Windows like 3.11, 2000 or XP, the best bet is Oracle's VM VirtualBox Manager. Heck, it can even run Sun's Solaris 10 and all flavors of Linux, for that matter!

On a lighter side, there are also emulators that allow die-hard fans of old gaming consoles like Atari, Nintendo and Sega to continue playing their all-time favorite games. One such emulator is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME):

Whether for work or play, virtual machines are here to stay. So it's time to get acquainted with them and who knows, you might just find new ventures and opportunities in the process...

Saelig's RevEng

Well, no... this post is not about an intriguing plot from a suspense novel. Saelig is a company specializing in electronic test, measurement, diagnostic and design solutions, and RevEng is a product from ABI Electronics which it represents in the US.

Dan Evans, the Sales Manager of Saelig, came to know about my book through a tweet I posted in Twitter and bought a copy. He was of course delighted to discover one full chapter on the RevEng system. He has since made contact with me for permission to reproduce that chapter for distribution to his clients, which I heartily approved.

Here's what he wrote in his LinkedIn post:

Although Singapore engineer and author Ng Keng Tiong devoted most of one chapter of his new book to ABI Electronics' RevEng system, people at ABI and Saelig Company were not aware of the author or his work until we saw a tweet about the new book.

Published just three months ago, PCB-RE Tools and Techniques is the sequel to an earlier book titled The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering, which is about reverse engineering the hard way – without assistance from hardware/software tools.  

Along with information from other reverse engineering experts, PCB-RE Tools and Techniques includes information about systems that help automate the process of reverse engineering. Titled Clip-N-Learn: As Easy As ABC, Chapter 8 is mostly devoted to ABI Electronics' RevEng system which, quote:

To demonstrate the clip-n-learn technique I have selected ABI Electronics RevEng system for its straightforward design and ease-of-use.

as the author wrote in his introduction to that chapter.

For more information of the RevEng system for your PCB-RE needs, contact Dan Evans @ Saelig. I'm sure he'll be more than happy to show you its functionalities and capabilities.

Emulating VAX/VMS on a PC

Test program development on the Factron Series-700 ATEs were carried out off-the-testers since test debugging was top priority with limited time slots and access to the hardware. With a strength of about 30 programmers during our peak, we did our work in front of VT220 and VT320 terminals at our desks.

These dumb terminals were networked to a DEC MicroVAX 360 server system running a Program Management System (PMS) that emulates the Factron's environment, where we:

1. Input board description, assigned component models from the standard libraries or wrote custom models that were not found,

2. Processed these PCB-related files to generate the wirelist and test program for the target tester,

3. Created in-circuit test routines (ICTRs) for devices without test, and

4. Compiled these ICTRs and then the main test program.

After all the pre-testing work was completed, a data package was then generated using GETPART for downloading from the target tester's terminal, so the programmer could then work on debugging the test program on a real board that was interfaced via an in-circuit fixture to the tester itself.

Overtime, maintaining and servicing the MicroVAX server become expensive and we started looking for an alternative to do away with the aging hardware which none but a few senior engineers knew how to operate. The VAX machine was reliable but not the hard disk, and though we frequently back up to tapes, finding replacement for the disks proved challenging as the available stocks diminished, mostly refurbished parts that had limited life-span anyway.

Fortunately, there were companies out there specializing in virtualization software that can emulate legacy VAX systems. After some evaluation, we engaged a company that helped us migrated the MicroVAX server to a Windows-based PC using the Charon-VAX solution. Of course, we paid quite a bit for the software license and service, but within three years it was recouped.

Now, after leaving my company, I still looked back fondly how I worked on the VAX environment. Is it possible to create my own virtual machine for VAX/VMS without having to pay a high price for the software license? I wondered. I soon found out that it was plausible indeed. Here is a screenshot of my very own VAX machine running the familiar VMS operating system within Windows 10:

The best thing is, I can customize it to look like the VT220 of the Factron DEC terminal and bring back some good memories. Like they say, good legacy software never dies; it just lives on in another hardware host that permits it to thrive in. Simply awesome!