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

Monday, December 13, 2021

The Matrix Reprogrammed

Since it's debut in 1999, The Matrix has spun two successive movies four years later, a sequel (The Matrix Reloaded) and a trilogy (The Matrix Revolutions). It's latest incarnation, The Matrix Resurrections came almost after a 20-year absence, re-igniting interest in this topic. But will the storyline and special effects deliver?

I'll have to admit, it took a while for me to figure out the concept behind The Matrix when I first watched it. Special effects aside, the idea that reality is simulated in the brain instead of lived out in the body seemed far-fetched back then. Not anymore in this age of the Metaverse, where virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) began to blur the line of distinction between what is real and imaginary. Kinda scary, isn't it?

The Matrix, however, has been around even before it came onto the silver screen. We electronic engineers encounter them on a daily basis, in the form of programmable logic devices:

Whether it's factory or field programmable, from the early days of PROM all the way to today's complex FPGAs, The Matrix continues to re-invent itself (not just reloaded or revolutionized). Heck, if resurrections is anything to go by, it'll probably be a retrospection of past technologies rejuvenated by today's advances in science and a fair bit of fiction.

And that's a whole bunch of 'Re-'s if you care to count...

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