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, February 5, 2021

Progress Update (Fourth Book)

Recently, I started working on my fourth book again, Manual PCB-RE: The Essentials, after almost three months of inactivity. I've removed all nine BGA chips onboard, namely the eight DDR2 memory ICs and the main GPU. There were residue solder leftover on the footprints of these ICs but the 30W soldering iron wasn't good enough to do copper braid removal, and I had to order a separate 80W iron with adjustable temperature to do the job. Here is the final result:


In the process of removing the BGA chips and cleaning up, I encountered several issues with the tools and these were mentioned in the new book to help readers learn from my mistakes, and what to look out for when choosing the tools to do the job.

Now that I have these teething issues out of the way, I can resume where I left off in the last chapter. Hopefully, I can get the draft out by end February or latest mid-March, and let Joe Grand go through before penning the Foreword, which he has graciously agreed to.

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