Reverse engineering of Printed Circuit boards: a conceptual idea

Abstract

With the advent of new technologies, many electronic manufacturing companies are competing among each other to capture the market and at the same to compete globally. For electronic equipment and appliances which are based on Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), new generations of PCB’s are being produced to suit the requirements of new products. This development can lead to waste and inefficiency when perfectly serviceable electronic components and appliances have to be scrapped because the spare PCB’s are no longer available from the original equipment manufacturer OEM or are already obsolete. There is a need to do reverse engineer or re-engineering on obsolete PCB’s or PCB’s which is no longer in production. Obsolete PCB’s is no longer manufactured and replacements are required. There might be a need to modify the current design but the necessary files are either lost or corrupt. This paper discusses a preliminary study in developing a new conceptual idea of producing reverse engineered PCB’s utilizing vectorization technique and electronic design software. The aim of this study is to create a new framework which will allow replacement of obsolete PCB’s.