KiCAD-Prism Native Visualizer & Future Roadmap

[krishna-swaroop]

All New Prism Native Schematic + PCB Renderer

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the lack of new features landing on main recently. I have been spending most of that time working on a larger architectural change for KiCAD-Prism: an all new native Schematic + PCB renderer.

The goal is to reduce KiCAD-Prism’s dependency on external viewers such as KiCanvas and ecad-viewer, while giving Prism more control over how KiCad designs are parsed, represented, rendered, reviewed, and compared over time.

This is an important pivot for the project. Rather than treating the schematic and PCB primarily as documents to display, the new pipeline is intended to make them structured, semantic design data that Prism can use for richer review workflows in the future.

The work is heavily inspired by Eli Hughes and Wavenumber Engineering’s work towards a CAD-neutral visualisation engine. The implementation uses the newly released kicad-monkeyand kicad-cruncher projects to parse KiCad design files and generate CAD-neutral Design JSON.

KiCAD-Prism then runs a custom semantic compiler over those outputs to generate renderer-ready assets. This gives the platform a foundation for features such as:

• Semantic-aware visual diffs between design revisions
• More contextual design-review workflows
• Better navigation between schematic, PCB, BOM, and manufacturing information
• Future multi-board and system-level visualisation work
• More direct support for evolving KiCad file formats without waiting for third-party viewer updates
• Custom interaction patterns built specifically around hardware review rather than generic file viewing

You can test the current implementation on the feature/semantic-viewer-monorepobranch.

What is available now

The new renderer is organized into four main areas:

PCB

This is a WebGPU-based PCB renderer with Level of detail rendering and frustum culling optimisations. I've managed to get a 120FPS with short dips to ~80 FPS while rendering a dense 12 layer PCB. The renderer currently allows users to interactively select/highlight nets, zones, components by clicking on them.

PCB View

The PCB View renders the board layers in 2D and exposes the board structure in a format that can evolve beyond a static Gerber-style view.

It is intended to become the primary place for inspecting:

• Copper and non-copper layers
• Component placement
• Board geometry
• Silkscreen and documentation layers
• Nets, pads, vias, and other PCB-level design entities
• Future revision and review annotations

3D View

The 3D View renders the PCB assembly in 3D, allowing users to inspect board placement, mechanical clearances, enclosure fitment, and component geometry directly from the Prism workspace.

This is still evolving, but the longer-term goal is to make the 3D view useful for design review rather than only visual presentation.

Net selection and Cross-Probing is supported!

Schematic

The Schematic renderer takes a different approach from a conventional page-by-page document viewer.

Instead of treating every schematic sheet as an isolated file, Prism instantiates the pages together in a shared “world” view. This is intended to make it easier to understand a design as a connected system rather than a collection of separate PDF-like pages.

The foundation here is especially important for:

• Cross-sheet navigation
• Hierarchical-sheet awareness
• Net and signal tracing
• Contextual review comments (yet to be implemented)
• Design-change visualization (yet to be implemented)
• System-level exploration of large schematics

The Schematic Renderer supports keyboard shortcuts to quickly navigate between pages and instances of a highlighted net.

BOM

The BOM tab provides a design-facing component view alongside the schematic and PCB.

The intent is to make it easier to move between the electrical, physical, and procurement perspectives of a component while staying inside the same review workspace.

Over time, this area can become the bridge for richer component-library, lifecycle, sourcing, alternates, and release-review workflows.

Stackup

The Stackup tab provides a dedicated place to inspect board-layer information and construction details.

This is intended to make stackup information more visible during review, rather than leaving it buried in board settings or fabrication exports.

Once KiCAD has native support for impedance profiles, that would be a great addition to this tab and workflow!

What I would like feedback on

The branch is still actively being developed, so feedback at this stage is particularly valuable before I clean things up and merge into main.

I would especially like to know:

• Does the layout of the PCB, Schematic, BOM, and Stackup tabs make sense for your review workflow?
• Does the schematic “world” view help you understand larger designs better than isolated sheet navigation?
• What information do you expect to see immediately when selecting a component, net, symbol, pad, or footprint?
• Which review tasks are currently painful in KiCad, PDFs, screenshots, or existing viewers?
• Which interactions would make you trust this as part of a real design-review process?
• Are there cases where the renderer feels slower, less clear, or less useful than KiCanvas, ecad-viewer, or KiCad itself?
• What should be prioritized next: review comments, visual diffs, BOM workflows, 3D inspection, manufacturing review, or something else?

Please test the branch against real projects where possible, especially multi-sheet schematics, dense PCBs, boards with 3D models.

The branch is available here:

https://github.com/krishna-swaroop/KiCAD-Prism/tree/feature/semantic-viewer-monorepo

In addition to the renderer, I've also added Skill.md files to enable users to use AI Agents to easily deploy KiCAD-Prism. Do check them out!

Thank you to everyone who has been following the project, testing early builds, filing issues, and sharing ideas. This renderer is a significant foundation change for KiCAD-Prism, and early feedback will help shape it into something genuinely useful for hardware teams.

[patzf]

Thanks for the efforts, this is a cool project!
I still have to checkout your latest release - from my opinion, i.e. what I think would be most useful is indeed the visual diff. Even in not too complex projects it is (in general, not with respect to your tool) a pain to scrape through changes and making sure of not having overlooked something

[jara-hmnd]

Hello!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you've moved to a platform-agnostic frontend, and a collection of tools to convert KiCad files to this agnostic file format.

That means that, in theory, we could build an Altium converter, and have Prism work as a direct replacement for Altium 365. In parallel with it, too, as using Prism doesn't mean that other users in the organisation doesn't have to switch away from A365, as they choose.
Considering Altium's essentially absentee-landlord style of software development, once Prism achieves feature-parity with A365, any additional functionality makes a good case for transitioning away from A365, and also eases a potential switch to KiCad.

Is that a reasonable supposition?
It's an uphill battle to justify switching ECAD packages in a professional organisation, but honestly, I think the zeitgeist is almost right for many companies.

[krishna-swaroop]

Yep! That's exactly the idea. To make things better an Altium converter already exists!! The altium-cruncher and altium-monkey repos from Wavenumber resolve into the same intermediate format and can be displayed by the viewer

[krishna-swaroop]

On that note, it would be helpful if y'all could highlight where the feature parity is missing so that I can get on that!
Commenting features and a proper review focused Visual Diff are sorely missing at the moment. These will be the next ones in the pipeline but I don't want to just copy A365 here as I don't think the Visual Diff across commits is particularly useful especially in big projects.
Currently working on making "story" points which are preclassified changes essentially. Once I am happy with an exhaustive list of changes, I am planning on mapping them to an appropriate way of visualizing them.

[krishna-swaroop]

Some feedback I've received from teams wanting to switch over from Altium has been regarding Component and Library Management.
As part of this, I've been working on a proper Asset & Audit tracked, Version and Revision controlled Library Management System with robust release flows

This should ship very soon hopefully.
Looking forward to getting feedback on the UI and the workflow!

The previous SQLite implementation started to come to a crawl with ~30k components and multiple users using the Remote Symbol Panel. Moved things to PostgreSQL and am working on making this a first-class functionality of Prism. Might look at integrating Redis based caching as well if performance for multiple users starts to take a hit. But this is far from being implemented.

Hoping to add the following importers as well to reduce friction for migration to this scheme:

1. File-Explorer based import so that users can point to the directory that has all their libraries and Prism handles the import
2. HTTP/Database Library Import so that users who have already deployed their own solutions can switch easily

[krishna-swaroop]

A first-class commenting system as well finally!

Please test this out and provide feedback!