Hi HN! My brother and I built Refringence because we found learning hardware design is tough and scattered. Many colleges from where I am from don’t teach it well, and training courses are really expensive and unstructured.

Refringence helps by providing a context AI mentor and a browser-based IDE/playground where you can do h/w challenges and projects, run simulations, and view waveforms, all in one place with no need to install tools.

We’ve started rolling it out gradually and have about 200 users so far. Many say it helps them get unstuck faster compared to juggling multiple separate tools.

We have tried to incorporate practice and challenges for several tools and languages in hardware, like Verilog, RISC-V, x86, MATLAB/Octave, embedded C, and Qiskit for quantum computing. We’re also working on adding digital and analog circuit simulation challenges and have started creating roadmaps for structured learning.

Since we are hardware engineers ourselves and still learning, we are constantly improving the platform. We appreciate your patience with any rough edges. We have focused on making the infrastructure as secure and seamless as possible.

We would love to hear your feedback.