MTBoM: Metal Trace to Bill of Materials Generation for PCB Reverse Engineering

In this work, we developed an automatic tool for printed circuit board reverse engineering (PCB-RE) in which it is assumed that the PCBs are devoid of any components or silkscreens, with only the wiring traces being accessible on the various layers. This models the scenario where the PCBs are damaged and/or discarded. We demonstrate that our PCBRE tool extracts the correct Bill of Materials (BoM) for ten different PCBs by analyzing primarily the metal layers. The proposed PCB-RE tool MTBoM detected every integrated circuit (IC) on the PCBs with no false positives and no false negatives. This scheme also identifies passive components, such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors.