Requirements

Spreadsheets are flexible and familiar — but they don't scale. As your team or product grows, you run into version drift, unclear ownership, no traceability, and manual audit prep. Managing requirements in documents is like designing from a printed schematic — it looks right, but it's already outdated. Altium replaces scattered spreadsheets with a collaborative, versioned, and traceable workspace that integrates directly with your design and verification workflows — without the cost and complexity of enterprise platforms. Capture and manage requirements and verification in Requirements Portal, work with requirements in Altium Designer and Altium 365.

Download Requirements Management Guide → 

No. Altium's requirements capabilities are designed for engineers, not requirements specialists. The tool guides your workflow — you don't need formal training or a mature process in place. If your team can work with a spreadsheet, they can work with this.

Requirements are natively supported in Altium Designer and all electronic design files uploaded to your Altium cloud workspace. Link requirements to schematics, PCB layouts, and BOMs — down to the component level. Status changes automatically sync across your project, so engineers always work from up-to-date specifications.

Yes. The requirements importer lets you drop XLS, PDF, or DOC files and convert them into structured requirements. 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.

No. Most hardware teams don't follow a formal requirements process — and that's exactly who this is built for. Requirements and design evolve in parallel in real product development. Altium supports that reality: start from what you have, structure as you go, and add traceability and verification as your process matures. Lightweight means easy to adopt — not limited in capability.

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

If your team is working toward standards like IEC 60601, ISO 13485, CFR Part 820, ISO 13485, or FDA regulations, you need to demonstrate that every requirement has been verified and that evidence is traceable end to end. Altium lets you plan verification activities, create test cases, and capture evidence directly against your requirements. 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.