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

Friday, March 23, 2018

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.

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