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

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

MCU - It's Not What You Think

These days, when people see the acronym 'MCU' they'll associate it with 'Marvel Cinematic Universe', thanks to the series of movies like 'X-Men' and 'The Avengers'. For electronic engineers, 'MCU' simply stands for 'Microcontroller Unit', one of many branches of the processor universe.

In fact, just like the Nine Realms mentioned in the 'Thor' movie and its spin-offs, there are also various realms or architectures of processors (some say there are five while others claim there are ten). And like the 5000-year convergence that remove the boundaries between the Nine Realms, processors are also gradually blurring their lines of distinction.

The latest incarnation is RISC-V, an ISA based on reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles, but unlike most other ISA designs, it is provided under a open source license that does not require fees to use. This is significant because it will allow smaller device manufacturers to build hardware without paying royalties and allow developers and researchers to design and experiment with a proven and freely available instruction set architecture. It will also encourage innovation and competition at a time when many large manufacturers are buying up their competitors, such as the recent acquisition of Arm Ltd by Nvidia.

But I'm not sure if that is the finality of the processor evolution, just as Thanos mistakenly bragged "I am inevitable" only to find out that he had lost all his marbles (stones) to Tony Stark with the last words, "And I am Iron Man!"

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