Abstract The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt will systematically study dense baryonic matter created in collisions of intense heavy-ion beams with nuclear targets. The research addresses current questions of strong-interaction physics as confinement in normal nuclear matter, chiral symmetry restoration in deconfined matter at high temperatures and densities, and the search for the critical end-point of the phase boundary. With beams of ions as heavy as Au and U, energies up to 45 GeV/nucleon and intensities up to 10 12 ions per pulse, FAIR will enable CBM to probe the phase diagram of quantum chromo dynamics (QCD) in a region poorly known, while being complementary to current and future research programmes at RHIC and LHC. The CBM experiment is planned as a fixed-target spectrometer optimized for the detection of rare probes. Among these are open charm and low-mass vector mesons, important observables for the initial energetic and dense phase of the collisions. The experimental concept and challenge is to accomplish charged particle tracking in the high-multiplicity, high-radiation collision environment. This will be realized exclusively with a silicon tracking detector system installed in a strong magnetic dipole field directly behind the target. Key to the physics of CBM and benchmark for the tracking is the reconstruction of short-lived charmed mesons that puts high demands on the silicon detectors. The article presents a conceptual design of the CBM experiment with emphasis on the silicon tracking system. Requirements for silicon microstrip and pixel detectors and their arrangement in the tracker are discussed in relation to important physics observables addressed by CBM.