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, April 7, 2022

Update on Chapter 5

Been working relentlessly on this chapter for the past couple of weeks and nearing completion. By far, this is the most interesting chapter to write. I've covered quite a bit on the elements of analog circuits, from the issues of discrete versus integrated, passive versus active, and mechanical versus solid-state, on to circuit topologies involving transistors, MOSFETs and operational amplifiers.


Trying to cover every aspect of analog circuits is near impossible, so I choose to highlight the essentials and what topologies best represent the elements discussed. Hopefully readers will catch on and expand on what they have learned to further enrich their understanding in deciphering schematics. Of course, I will follow on with a chapter that showcase a full-blown analog circuit and how to go about making sense of its functionalities and design. After all, what is theory if there is no practice, right?

As to why I decided to write this book before PCB Diagnostics (which I started out after completing the PCB-RE series) is because I realize that understanding circuit diagrams is an important key to repairing circuit boards. For readers who have no foundation in electronics, this book will give a good overview of what constitute digital, analog and hybrid circuit designs, with an added bonus on power supply circuits.

It should be a book worth waiting for, though it's by no means easy on my part to write it, coming from the perspective of someone wishing there is a better way to be given a broad overview of electronics  (interesting and informative enough without all the nitty-gritty details) and the know-how in decoding the blueprint that made up these circuits.

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