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REVERSE ENGINEERING OF MARINE PCB :

The need for REVERSE ENGINEERING OR RE ENGINEERING PCB's comes about for a variety of reasons chief among them is the need to replace an obsolete board that is no longer available from the original manufacturer (OEM). When a ship is become old by ten years, OEM stop production or modify the electronic circuits, hence replacements such PCB may not be available for replacement. Now a day’s most of the OEM is giving block diagram instead of circuit diagram. This block diagram is not useful for servicing of PCB’s.

Often companies employ us to reverse engineer their own designs, because they have little or no documentation for their own product or their current design firm or manufacturer refuses to release design details and manufacturing files. Another reason is cost. Some boards are considered proprietary by the OEM when in fact they are not; they are just too expensively priced. Re-engineering a PCB assembly can provide improved or added performance to an old process. New and improved components and techniques may be utilized during the reverse engineering process improving operations, maintenance and support. PCB reverse engineering is done by hand. We also use computerized scanning programs because we have found that too much of a circuit can be missed and you end up doing it by hand anyway. We believe that doing the job right the first time saves time and money. A design engineer checks the emerging schematic to see that it makes sense. All too often, simple common sense is all that is needed to avoid costly errors.

Is it legal? what about Copyright and patent laws ? Our process places location critical components on the board where they need to be. The new board is schematically 100% identical and correct with different trace routing and different components. Thereby avoiding possible copyright infringement.

REVERSE ENGINEERING GLOSSARY

Architecture : A system description, including system components and how they interact.

Design Decision : An explicit refinement of a program design. Each decision reflects the elaboration of a design or programming plan into a more concrete realization.

Reengineering : The examination and modification of a system to reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent re-implementation of the new form. 2 The examination and alteration of an existing subject system to reconstitute it in a new form. This process encompasses a combination of sub-processes such as reverse engineering, restructuring, re-documentation, forward engineering and re-targeting. 3 Also known as renovation and reclamation. It is the examination and alteration of a subject system to reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent implementation of the new form. [chikofsky] Reengineering is the systematic transformation of an existing system into a new form to realize quality improvements in operation, system capability, functionality, performance or violability at a lower cost, schedule or risk to the customer. Reengineering also emphases the importance of a greater return on investment than could be achieved through a new development effort.

Reverse Engineering : "the process of analyzing a subject system to identify the system's components and their interrelationships and create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction." 1 Reverse engineering is usually undertaken in order to redesign the system for better maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without access to the design from which it was originally produced.

References : [chikofsky and Cross] Eliot J Chikofsky & James H Cross. Reverse engineering and design recovery: A taxonomy. IEEE Software, 7(1):13-17, January 1990. [foldoc] The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, London UK, http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foldoc [jlccrm] Reengineering Definitions of the Joint Logistic Commanders Computer Resources Management group, http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/~red/defin.html [sei] Perspectives on legacy system reengineering. Reengineering centre, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 1995.