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 3, 2026

The Promise of Electronics


Like any Singaporean male, I had to render obligatory national service to my country. Two years of my life, given to the military, required by law. But unlike most, I wasn't serving two years and returning to civilian life. I had signed on as a regular. The Air Force was now my employer, my future, my path forward.

Basic military training, or BMT, is where every new recruit undergoes a three-month stint of intensive, tactical training in military craft. For the conscripts or NSmen, it would be their full experience of military life before being posted to units where they would serve out their time.

For us regulars, the ones who had signed on for a career, our BMT was compressed. Still physically demanding—the runs, the marches, the obstacle courses, the drills—but shortened, so that more time could be devoted to what we were actually here for: technical training. 

And through it all, I kept my eyes on the horizon. Beyond BMT lay the real work. The work I had signed up for. The work that would build on everything I had learned at the polytechnic. The work that would, if I was lucky, fulfill the promise I had made to myself and my family.

But destiny, I was about to learn, has a way of taking unexpected turns. Looking back, I marvel at the path that had brought me here. The promise of electronics had fulfilled itself in ways I never could have imagined.

And it was just the beginning.



 

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