Introduction
Second Silicon gives hardware engineers one workspace for reading a design, asking design questions, and working through board faults. Import a KiCad or Altium project folder, open its board, and use a thread to reason over the design.
Second Silicon runs in your browser at app.secondsilicon.ai. Pair Symbiote when a workflow needs a supported local tool or instrument.
Who Second Silicon is for
- PCB designers chasing a board that doesn’t behave as expected.
- Embedded engineers correlating firmware behavior with hardware symptoms.
- Electronics teams who want a shared record of what was tried, what was measured, and what the conclusion was.
Basic concepts
You’ll see these terms throughout the docs and the app.
Workspace is the container for all your designs, threads, and exports. Most users have one. You sign in to a specific workspace and can switch from the account menu.
Project is one design effort — usually a product or a board family. Projects live inside a workspace.
Board is a single PCB variant within a project. A project can have several boards, such as revisions A, B, and C.
Design is the imported KiCad or Altium source backing a board. The design is what the agent reads.
Thread is a focused conversation tied to a board. The schematic view offers Design, Debug, and Ask. The firmware view offers Build, Debug, and Ask. Availability depends on the board and enabled workspace features.
How a session fits together
Import a design, open a thread, and describe a symptom or design goal. The agent can inspect the active board context, suggest measurements, and highlight relevant components or nets. Measurements can be entered by hand or captured from a supported instrument through Symbiote. When you are done, download the thread history as a PDF.
The agent keeps the full circuit context across the thread, so you don’t re-explain the board after every question.
Next: Quickstart to set up your first project.