The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering: Tools & Techniques: June 2020

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

Thursday, June 25, 2020

How To Take Good PCB Photos

When it comes to writing your own engineering books, good photos and illustrations are indispensable. No reader enjoys looking at photos that are blurred or poorly taken. Most of the time, I would figure in my mind what I wanted to include in each page and then search for relevant photos that do not have copyright, or if there were, I would ask for permission from the owners as much as I could trace the source. There were also times when I had to buy from stocked photo platforms like Shutterstock, but I felt it was worth the price to ensure my readers have an enjoyable reading experience.

But for the PCBs that I worked on, I depended mostly on photos taken using my mobile phone camera which, in most cases were quite adequate for the job. For my next book which is currently in the works, I started entertaining the idea of a more professional approach. The first attempt using a phone camera for the Gigabyte graphics card looks like this:

It's kinda...OK, except that perspective errors had obscured some reference designators around those tall components, and also the lightings were not evenly distributed and cast shadows on certain areas of the PCB. So I went online to look for some sort of studio light box that is compact but big enough to house the card and found one which is suitable for my purpose. The LED lightings were bright and even against a white backdrop, ensuring minimum shadow effects.

To correct for the perspective errors, I used a bridge camera to take the photo at a farther distance using a zoom factor of 17. The result:

Can you see the difference? I'm certainly pleased with how the photo turns out. Readers can now expect professional quality photos in my next book, Manual PCB-RE: The Essentials. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me to write but I can assure you that it will be worth the wait. I will update as the book progresses but in the meantime, if you have not gotten yourself a copy of my trilogy books, please proceed to the Order page to take a look, click on the links to bring you to Amazon where you can preview the contents, and then decide.

Take care and stay safe, my readers!

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Graphics Card PCB-RE

My old desktop PC which is self-configured around an Intel P35 motherboard running off an E8400 Core2 Duo CPU, is still working well after almost 12 years on. Of course, I have upgraded the DDR RAM from 2GB to the current 8GB, and replaced the now defunked 250GB hard disk with a solid state drive of the same capacity. The last to go was the Gigabyte GeForce 8600 GT graphics card using an NVIDIA G84 GPU, which had caused some issues due to its Windows 10 driver compatibility and subsequent hardware failure.

Somehow, I didn't think to throw that old piece of 'junk' away. Nostalgia reason may be, but on hindsight it seemed to have been a good decision. Recently, I started working on my fourth book, Manual PCB-RE: The Essentials, again after shelving it aside for nearly one and a half years. The structure of the book is already in place; what it lacks is a candidate. Naturally, this graphics card came to mind. Besides being a contemporary example of a consumer PCB, it has some interesting features which makes for a rather challenging PCB-RE study.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to reverse it and then put it into content form, perhaps partially to showcase the essential techniques employed in manual PCB-RE. Hopefully, there will not be too many disturbances or disruptions to distract me from my writing.

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