An automotive PCB copy takes a physical vehicle board — an ECU, body control module, instrument cluster, charger board, LED tail-light driver — and rebuilds it into manufacturable files: Gerbers, drill data, netlist, BOM, and a schematic if you need one. For automotive work the hard parts are usually the conformal coating, the potting compound, the automotive-grade parts that have gone obsolete, and the locked microcontroller sitting in the middle of it all. This page covers how we handle each of those, what we need from you, and where the honest limits sit.
Who actually orders an automotive PCB copy, and why
Almost every project we see falls into one of four buckets, and the bucket determines the deliverable set.
- Aftermarket and fleet repair. A module is discontinued, dealer stock is gone, and a workshop or fleet operator needs replacement boards. They want a working board, not a design file.
- Production continuity. A Tier 2 supplier still ships a 12-year-old module, the original layout files were lost with a departed engineer or a dead server, and production is running on a Gerber set nobody can edit.
- Obsolescence engineering. An AEC-Q100 part went end-of-life, and someone needs the netlist and BOM before they can qualify a replacement and re-spin the layout.
- Failure analysis and validation. A board field-fails in a specific way, and the team needs an accurate schematic to reason about it — often around the supply, load dump protection, or a CAN transceiver.
In all four cases you should hold rights to the design you send us, or authorization from whoever does. We work under NDA on every project and we don’t reproduce someone else’s product for a third party.
What makes automotive boards different from ordinary PCB copy work
Conformal coating and potting
Most under-hood and in-door electronics are coated. Acrylic coating comes off with solvent and patience. Silicone is worse — it tears rather than dissolves, and it likes to lift small passives with it. Fully potted modules, common in EV charge controllers and some transmission units, need the epoxy removed layer by layer, and the honest position is that some potted boards cannot be recovered without destroying part of the circuit. We tell you that after we see photos, not after you’ve paid.
Automotive-specific circuit blocks
A vehicle board has features you rarely see on consumer hardware, and each one needs deliberate attention during capture:
- Reverse-battery and load-dump protection on the 12 V or 24 V input — usually a chunky TVS, series diode or ideal-diode controller that must be identified by exact part, not by “diode”.
- CAN, LIN, FlexRay or CAN FD transceivers with split termination and common-mode chokes. Termination values change bus behavior, so they get measured, not guessed.
- High-side and low-side driver ICs for injectors, relays, solenoids and lamps, often with sense resistors in the milliohm range.
- Heavy copper pours and thermal vias under FETs. On a motor drive stage the copper weight is part of the design, and it gets carried into the stackup rather than normalized to 1 oz.
- Wide-temperature parts. An X7R in a cabin module and an X7R in an engine bay module may look identical and behave very differently over -40 °C to +125 °C.
Layer count and stackup
Two-layer boards still show up in lighting, sensors and simple relay modules. Modern ECUs and clusters are typically four to eight layers, sometimes with impedance-controlled pairs for a display interface or Ethernet. Getting the stackup right matters more here than on a consumer board, because an ECU that passes on the bench and fails EMC is a wasted spin. We record dielectric thicknesses and copper weights as measured, and flag anything that looks impedance-critical so it can be checked against IPC-2221 spacing and IPC-2152 current guidance during review.
How the process runs, step by step
- Intake and photos. We look at coating type, layer count guess, connector count, BGA presence, and whether the MCU is likely locked. You get feasibility, lead time and price before anything is touched.
- Documented teardown. High-resolution top and bottom scans, then component removal in mapped order. Every part is bagged and referenced to a location. Markings that are laser-etched and faint get imaged under angled light.
- Component identification. Marking codes are decoded to real part numbers where the marking allows it. Where a house-numbered or sanded part appears, we characterize it electrically — pinout, breakdown voltage, gain, package — and say so plainly in the BOM instead of inventing a part number.
- Layer separation and scanning. Outer layers are imaged after solder mask removal; inner layers are exposed by controlled grinding and scanned individually. Vias, blind or buried structures and any hidden nets get cross-checked with the same X-ray and inspection methods we use on industrial controller boards before the copper is removed.
- Rebuild in CAD. Traces are vectorized, pads placed on real footprints, drill sizes measured, and the netlist extracted. This is where a copy stops being a picture and becomes editable data.
- Verification. The extracted netlist is compared back against the original board with continuity testing on a sampled set of nets — power, ground, bus lines, and every net around the connectors first. Discrepancies get resolved on the physical board, not in software.
- Optional bare-board and assembled samples. We fabricate, assemble, and where you can define pass criteria, run a functional check against your original module.
What you get, and how it maps to what you’re trying to do
| Deliverable tier | What’s included | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing copy | Gerbers, drill files, stackup, solder paste and silkscreen layers, BOM, pick-and-place | You need identical replacement boards for repair or continuity, no design changes |
| Copy + editable CAD | Everything above plus native layout, footprints, netlist | Layout tweaks, connector changes, a panel change, or shrinking the board |
| Full reverse engineering | Above plus hierarchical schematic with power, CAN and driver stages annotated | Obsolescence redesign, failure analysis, safety review, requalification |
| Board + firmware | Above plus firmware read from the MCU or external flash, where feasible | Source code and hex are lost and the module has to keep functioning |
Most automotive customers who came in wanting “just Gerbers” end up needing the schematic tier, because sooner or later an AEC-Q qualified part goes obsolete and someone has to understand the circuit to replace it.
The firmware question on automotive modules
A copied ECU board without its program is an expensive paperweight. Automotive modules commonly use locked parts from the Renesas RH850 and RX families, NXP MPC5xxx and S12, Infineon TriCore and XC families, and plenty of ST and Microchip 8- and 16-bit devices in simpler modules. Protection ranges from a plain lock bit on an older 8051-class part, through STM32 RDP levels, to hardware security modules on current gateway controllers.
Feasibility depends on the exact die revision, the protection level actually programmed, and whether the code sits in internal flash, an external serial flash, or both. Older parts and lower protection settings are often readable; current parts with active secure boot and debug permanently disabled frequently are not, and we say no when that’s the answer. Where recovery is possible we handle it as a combined project so the board copy and the code work line up on one timeline. We never guarantee a specific chip, and we don’t publish attack recipes.
What to send us, and what comes back
Five minutes of prep gets you a real answer instead of a range.
- Clear photos of both sides, whole board in frame, on a dark non-reflective background, camera parallel to the board.
- Close-ups of the main MCU marking and any large driver or power ICs — full lines of text, including date codes.
- Board dimensions and, if you know it, layer count. A photo of the board edge helps us count layers.
- Whether the board is coated or potted, and whether you can spare a second unit as a sacrificial sample.
- One line on what you need: bare boards only, editable CAD, schematic, or firmware included.
- Quantity, if you’re planning production. It changes the sourcing strategy for automotive-grade parts.
Back from us: a feasibility assessment naming the specific risks on your board, a lead time, a price, and a note on anything we think we may not be able to recover. A single-sided lighting module and an eight-layer gateway with BGAs are different projects, which is why we quote per board rather than per layer.
Where automotive PCB copy gets hard or stops being feasible
The cases that give us trouble, stated plainly:
- Fully potted modules where epoxy has bonded into fine-pitch pad gaps. Recovery is sometimes partial.
- Water-damaged or thermally cooked boards with delaminated inner layers. Missing copper is missing information, and a second sample often decides the project.
- House-numbered ASICs and custom sensor front ends. We can characterize the interface, but a proprietary die has no drop-in equivalent.
- Security-hardened gateway and immobilizer functions. These exist to resist exactly this, and we treat them as out of scope rather than promising a result.
- Single-sample HDI boards with stacked microvias. Destructive layer separation means one shot at getting the imaging right.
Cost tracks
Working on a board like this?
Send the chip marking or two photos. You get feasibility, lead time and price within 24 hours, and the check costs nothing.
Get a free quote