Advances in reverse engineering are becoming a vastly more powerful tool in electronic repair of commercial and DoD systems

Reverse engineering has recently evolved into a powerful tool in the electronic repair process. Advances in four areas in the reverse engineering process now combine to offer remarkable speed, flexibility and accuracy to the electronic repair engineer. Test systems hardware innovations increase the rate and resolution of automatic wirelist generation by an order of magnitude. Powerful software developments simultaneously improve robustness and user-friendliness of current GUI-based systems. The constant increase in microprocessor bus speeds make PC-based test equipment the emerging winner for performance, economy, and shorter operator learning curve. Novel mathematical algorithms executed within the new software integrate a number of "intelligent" capabilities that greatly enhance the speed of the wirelist.