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, March 10, 2026

The Language of the Machines


In the course my thirty years career in Electronics, both in the air force and ST Electronics, I have worked on several automated test equipment. Each of these machines has its own language to learn and master, some in high-level descriptive form much like English, some in minimalist cryptic syntax, and some using a mix of graphical and text combinations.

My first two years in ST Electronics were spent assisting two engineers to develop test programs on the RADCOM. That's what I was headhunted to do. But I was expected to work on the Factron S700 series testers, just like the rest of the engineers in the department. This was also my expectation when I decided to join the company—to pick up new skillsets and continue my learning journey in Electronics.

Text-based machines soon gave way to graphical-based platforms as the work center sought to upgrade its capabilities and attrack young engineers who were more comfortable working in the Windows environment. Enter the Spectrum 8800 series ATEs. To protect existing assets and continue our support for the armed forces, we did quite a fair bit of test program migration and test fixture adaptation from the old machines to the new. Tedious but necessary.

When our sister subsidiary, ST Aerospace, landed on a big F-16 project to develop test program on their newly acquired WesTest 2000/DATS station, several of us senior engineers were lobed in to train on the tester and help develop the test program sets. 

The language of the machines is vast. I've learned only a small part of it. But that small part has been enough—more than enough—to sustain a career, to solve impossible problems, to find meaning and satisfaction in the work.

And the best part? I'm still learning.

 

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