Requirements
Capture requirements and link them to electronic designs, systems,
verification, and test cases for full traceability and faster, more agile iterations.
Bring Requirements Where Design Decisions Happen
Work as one with requirements in your electronics development platform. Import, view, break down, and verify requirements so your team can make design decisions from up-to-date specifications. Connect requirements to designs to keep everyone aligned.
Trace Requirements from Designs to Verified Hardware
Link requirements to PCB schematics and layouts—down to individual design features. Connect them to verification activities and test cases to ensure coverage. Give all collaborators full traceability to reduce the risk of missed requirements and enable faster, more agile iteration.
Track Project Progress & Ensure Quality
Track requirement implementation and verification in real time. Generate traceability matrices for audits from live data in minutes. Full change history turns compliance into a shared responsibility across the team, enabling you to compete in regulated markets.
Key Capabilities
Manage Requirements & Verification in One Shared Workspace
Move away from spreadsheets to manage requirements, verification activities and test cases in the cloud. Choose a secure, scalable and intuitive environment for true product co-creation with full traceability, versioning, and change history.
Align Your Team Early on Requirements to Prevent Rework
Without early alignment across systems, hardware, and testing, teams risk late-stage rework and collaboration breakdowns. Altium Develop closes these gaps so your peer-powered network can work as one, enabling faster iteration and full support of the electronics V-model from start to finish.
Maintain Visibility into Design Progress & Requirements Coverage
When requirements live in documents—not in your design tool—disconnects, delays, and errors are inevitable. In Altium Develop, engineers can work with requirements in context, linking them to schematics, layouts, and test cases. This shared view keeps the whole team aligned. Collaborators follow progress in real time, and managers can oversee status, resolve bottlenecks, and plan with confidence.
Generate Audit-Ready Reports From Live Requirements Data
Teams spend hours compiling traceability matrices, design verification plans, and reports from scattered tools—slowing progress and pulling focus from high-value co-creation. With Altium Develop, you can generate V&V artifacts directly from live requirement and test data, delivering current, audit-ready outputs with minimal team effort.
Connect Verification & Testing to Requirements & Designs
Test plans and evidence are often stuck in spreadsheets with no clear link to requirements—making it hard to prove coverage, collect evidence, or pass audits. Centralize your electronics verification and validation activities to enable true multidisciplinary co-creation. Link test cases to requirements, attach evidence, and generate audit-ready reports with full traceability.
FAQs
Most electronics teams still manage requirements in spreadsheets or shared documents. While flexible and free, these tools quickly become unscalable—leading to version control issues, missed requirements and costly rework. Traditional requirements management systems offer structure but are often expensive, complex and primarily used to store information rather than support engineers’ day-to-day work with requirements.
Altium’s requirements management and V&V capabilities are purpose-built for electronics teams. Available in Altium Develop and Altium Agile, they replace scattered spreadsheets with a collaborative, versioned and traceable environment that integrates directly with your design and verification workflows. Unlike generic requirements tools, the software is easy to adopt and designed to support agile electronic product development—without the cost and complexity of legacy enterprise platforms.
Download the Requirements Management Guide →
No. Altium offers flexible requirements management and V&V tools designed to support the development of software-defined products. While the software is especially strong in electronic hardware development, it is equally capable in broader engineering contexts—including, software and firmware for embedded solutions and software-defined products. We continue to add features that benefit electronics and embedded software teams alike.
Altium’s requirements management and V&V capabilities are purpose-built for electronics teams. Available in Altium Develop and Altium Agile, they replace scattered spreadsheets with a collaborative, versioned and traceable environment that integrates directly with your design and verification workflows.
Altium organizes requirements capabilities into two main modules: Requirements Management & Verification and Validation. Requirements are also present and natively supported in Altium Designer.
Core requirements features include:
- Requirements Traceability to PCB Designs: Give engineers constant access to clear requirements in the right context. Status changes automatically sync across your project.
- Requirements Importer: Import unstructured requirements into your Altium project from XLS, PDF or DOC files. Automatically convert them into structured data with an AI assistant.
- Templated Document Export: Automatically generate compliance documents, such as traceability matrices, from live requirements and verification and validation data using customizable templates.
- AI Requirements Assistant: Create clearer, smarter requirements in less time. Quickly break down incoming system requirements into clear electrical specifications with an AI assistant.
- Comments and Notifications: Engage your team’s experts in requirement review and implementation processes to arrive at the best possible specifications and solutions.
- Live Dashboards and Analytics: Monitor project progress and requirement verification status with live dashboards to quickly identify and resolve noncompliant design issues.
- Versioning and Change History: Automatically track requirement changes with full version history. Review past edits, keep teams aligned and ensure traceability and compliance.
- Parametric Requirements: Turn numerical values in requirements into parameters that can be reused across your project.
- Continuous Verifications: Create verification rules that automatically compare system performance to functional targets specified in the requirement.
You can import requirements from:
- Excel spreadsheets (XLS or CSV)
- Word files (DOC)
- PDF documents (PDF)
The importer uses AI to recognize and structure your data—including text, values, parameters and parent-child relationships—so you don’t have to start from scratch. This helps your team transition smoothly from informal documents to a scalable, collaborative requirements tool.
Altium’s AI assistant for requirements uses a custom large language model to automate engineering tasks. Altium does not collect or use customer data to train our AI assistant.
With the AI assistant, you can:
- Import requirements
- Generate requirements
- Improve requirements
- Break down requirements
- Parameterize requirements
- Find inconsistencies
- Assess quality
Altium’s requirements capabilities simplify awareness of standards such as FDA 21 CFR Part 820, ISO 13485 and IEC 60601 by connecting requirements, design data and verification in a traceable, audit-ready workflow.
Teams can link regulatory requirements to design outputs, track changes with version control and generate the documentation needed for FDA, EMA and ISO audits—all in one platform.
Valued by Users,
Trusted by Organizations
Department Director at Sensio
“We've found Altium's Requirements Portal to be a game-changer in our product development process. The structured approach to documenting requirements has streamlined our workflow, making it easier to manage and organize project specifications effectively. Working with requirements is both productive and enjoyable!”
Project Manager (R&D & CI) at Memtronik Innovations
“The ROI is FAST. We design three to five products a month, and reprints can easily increase our costs by 40%. Requirements Portal has saved us a lot of downtime in production. We basically got our value back in a couple of months.”
Systems Engineer at ISISPACE
“Requirements Portal has been an instrumental tool, allowing us to gather all-level requirements in one database and ensure full traceability throughout the project's life. Its ease of use, flexibility and scalability are features we really enjoy.”
Tool Solution Architect at Ultratronik GmbH (UX-Gruppe)
“The introduction of the Requirements Portal helps the UX-Group to always keep track of the fast changing requirements during the development process of our products. The integration into Altium is also a huge improvement for our review process during the hardware development and helps to shorten it noticeably.”
Resources
Guide
Requirements Management for Modern Electronic Hardware Teams
Video
Integrating Requirements into Your PCB Design Workflow
Podcast
Automating Requirements: How Altium 365 Is Changing Engineering