The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering: Tools & Techniques: March 2023

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

Saturday, March 25, 2023

PCB Diagnostics (Kindle Full-Color Edition)

Just when I thought I'm done with updating this blog, about three weeks into releasing my final engineering book, PCB Diagnostics, two readers who bought the print edition emailed me and asked if it is possible to send them color photos of certain pages. They cited having difficulties making out certain details from the black and white photos due to their poor eyesight conditions.

I promptly sent what they requested and then thought it might be good to come up with a color Kindle edition. One of the advantages, besides full-color, is the ability to zoom in for greater details. It took me about a week to replace all the photos and illustrations with color versions. Here are a few sample pages:

You can go to this link to preview more pages before placing order, if you have the Kindle app installed on your tablet devices. It may take a while for Amazon to update the preview content to the color edition though, but rest assured that it is in full-color.

Happy reading!

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Hidden Review

Just felt a need to include the following review from an UK reader who downloaded Deciphering Schematics from Kindle Unlimited, which did not get posted across all the Amazon platforms except in the UK (strange!):

My intention for writing this book is not so much to go into the mathematical analysis of typical electrical or transistor circuits. Many books have already done that. Rather, I want to help readers understand enough of the various elements and topologies that make up digital, analog, hybrid and power circuit designs to be able to decipher (or interpret, if you prefer) them. Even so, the book does include some fundamental formulas and circuit characteristic graphs as and when necessary so readers can grasp the concepts behind their designs.

Sometimes we can fail to see the forest for the trees when we try to go into too much analytical details. This is something which I wanted to avoid and simply get to the essential points, while maintaining a balance between theoretical models and real-world examples. And rather than doing a quick, slip-slop work to get this book out, I took great pains to draw most of the circuits and illustrations using Microsoft Visio, for example:

Readers who bought my book can be confident they are getting the best quality content for their money. That's my personal guarantee.

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