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, September 1, 2021

Interest and Query


Since announcing my fourth book, Manual PCB-RE: The Essentials on various social media platforms, there has been quite some interests generated over the series of PCB-RE books I've written. An engineer by the name Pedro Ribeiro emailed me:

Your books look amazing, but I wanted to ask your advice for which one should I get first.

I'm a software reverse engineer and ethical hacker and I'm specializing in attacking embedded systems. One of the first steps in attacking these systems is to identify serial or JTAG connections in order to obtain root access to them. However sometimes the JTAG/serial lines are cut after the device leaves the factory and need to be shorted, restored, a resistor needs to be added etc.

As you can see this is the kind of issue I face frequently which doesn't require a very deep understanding of PCB reverse engineering.

For this simple use case, which of your books do you recommend to get started? 

I'm sure other people would benefit if you put an explanation of what each book is and what is the intended audience in your blog! It's a bit confusing to try to understand what are the differences between each of the books.

Thanks in advance!

My reply:

Nice to hear from you and I’m happy to answer your query. 
I did a short write-up on the first three books in my blog. You can find it at this link.

The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering is for beginners who wants to learn how to document their manual approach in doing PCB-RE. There are two editions of the book, a full-color and a black-and-white.

PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques is for those who want a more complete treatment of the PCB-RE subject. It features contributing engineers who shared their experiences using different equipment and methodologies.

PCB-RE: Real-World Examples is for those who want to learn how engineers apply PCB-RE in real life scenarios. There is a chapter by Juan Carlos Jiménez on firmware hacking which should be useful to you.
Based on your interest and work, this is the book to get.

Manual PCB-RE: The Essentials is a more in-depth look at the manual method using a commercial PCB. This is for those who wants a no-frills guide to doing real-world manual PCB-RE.

Hope the above information helps.

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