PCB reverse engineering
The data generated in the reverse engineering process can be used for troubleshooting, repair, redesign and re-manufacturing, or even testing the security of a device to be used in a restricted environment.
[1] For industries with highly regulated electronics, (like military or aerospace) this approach can vastly reduce the time required to fabricate replacement parts for system repairs, since the new part's specifications match the original design exactly and therefore do not need to undergo the same level of rigorous re-certification and testing that would be required of a newly designed or revised circuit board.
For example, a power company in Florida was forced to shut down due to the failure of a single, inexpensive PCB, which had no replacement parts and no data available to print them.
[7][8] The process can be used to provide important benchmarking information about newly acquired products, prototype PCBs or any circuit board the company does not own.
[9][4] Data from the reverse engineering process can be used to immediately repair or reprint a circuit board using additive manufacturing techniques on multi-headed 3-D printers.
In situations where resources are limited like on a ship, submarine, space, or forward deployment, the reverse engineering process can enable a crew to maintain electronics equipment without being required to bring along spare parts.
[10] Data from reverse engineering can be taken with good intentions but mitigating intellectual property theft and maintaining privacy is increasingly important.
[12] Destructive reverse engineering (DRE) is a process where all layers of the board are imaged and subsequently removed by various milling techniques or tools.
If areas of copper are removed before they are imaged, this represents a permanent loss of data which can only be rectified by existing documentation of the PCB, or by reverse engineering a second, identical board.
Additional research is underway presently to improve the procedure of CT scanning, volumetric data reconstruction, and circuit layer extraction.
By comparison, destructive reverse engineering can produce high resolution, calibrated optical images of the same 6 layer board in under 2 hours at very low cost by a skilled operator.
Whereas a netlist is a simple ASCII-based text file that simply lists all of the connections of the board, a PCB Schematic relays the same information in a more visual manner.
In addition, a schematic can be merged with the bill of materials (BOM) and component pick and place data to further enhance its usability in troubleshooting scenarios, or can be used as a base for the design of a brand new PCB.
