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, March 12, 2026

The System Whisperer


The term came from my colleagues, not from me.

I never thought of myself as anything special. I was just an engineer who paid attention, who cared about the work, who refused to give up when problems seemed insurmountable. But somewhere along the way, people started noticing.

Not because I had any magical powers. Not because I could commune with machines through some mystical connection. Simply because I had learned, over years of patient work, to listen. To observe. To understand what the equipment was telling me, even when it spoke in subtle signals and obscure error codes.

Every system has a language. Most people only hear the silence when it works and the noise when it breaks. The whisperer learns to hear the conversation in between.

The systems I've worked with over the years—the RADCOM, the Factrons, the Teradynes, the WesTest, the countless boards and units and assemblies—they all have stories to tell. My job was simply to hear them.

And sometimes, to whisper back.

 

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