Keep a critical board alive
An outdated PCB may still power a machine you depend on. If it fails and no replacement exists, reverse engineering lets you maintain it for years — and clone it as a spare when repair is not an option.
Service 06
No drawings. No supplier. Still buildable.
Customers come to us with a board or a finished product and need more of the same. We recover the design, then make it manufacturable again.
Send us a sample boardThe short version
We rebuild the function, not the artefact.
In electronics, reverse engineering means rebuilding a PCB from an assembled product — because the original is faulty, obsolete, or simply undocumented.
What is PCB reverse engineering?
A customer arrives with a board, or a whole product, and needs more of them reproduced. That is where electronic reverse engineering comes in: boards rebuilt from assembled products, circuit boards that are failing and need replacing, or new PCBs designed to mimic the function of the ones you already have.
How do you reverse engineer a board?
We use scanning technology to capture artwork, photographs or the circuit board itself, and produce CAD data suitable for photo plotting so new boards can be manufactured.
It is a far more economical route than starting again, and it saves the cost of re-designing the CAD layout from scratch. It also ensures the new PCB functions like the original, without the risk of introducing fresh errors.
Why not make an exact copy?
Copying a board exactly would be both slow and expensive, because it means hunting down the old components instead of using current parts that are readily available and often better. So while the new boards perform the same way — frequently better — they are not an exact replica. That is a deliberate choice, and we document every deviation.
Why it is worth doing
Three problems this solves outright.
Recover missing documentation
Most modern boards ship with CAD data. Some do not. Reverse engineering produces the schematic and design information you never had, so you finally own documentation for a product you rely on.
Reduce reliance on outside experts
When a board misbehaves, the first move is usually to call whoever built it. With a documented design in hand, your own team can troubleshoot, repair and improve it.
Our process
Four stages, fully documented.
We have deep experience in reverse engineering for bulk production — both with and without dismantling layers and components.
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Stage 01
Capture
The board is scanned and photographed layer by layer. Where the construction allows, we work non-destructively; where it does not, we agree the approach with you first.
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Stage 02
Recover CAD & netlist
Copper geometry, drill data and the netlist are reconstructed into a live CAD project, and the bill of materials is rebuilt from the populated sample.
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Stage 03
Redesign around current parts
Obsolete devices are replaced with current equivalents, footprints are corrected, and manufacturability issues in the original are fixed rather than reproduced.
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Stage 04
Prove and release
A prototype batch is fabricated, assembled and tested against the original's behaviour. You receive the full CAD project, fabrication data and documentation.
We only reverse engineer boards you are entitled to have reproduced. Please confirm you own the design or hold the rights to copy it before sending a sample.