Requirements

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, Altium Agile Teams and Altium Agile Enterprise,  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, Altium Agile Teams and Altium Agile Enterprise, 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 natively supported in Altium Designer and all electronic design file uploaded to the Altium webviewer.
 

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.

With Altium’s requirements management and V&V capabilities you can generate a range of compliance documents—such as traceability matrices or verification plans—directly from your live project data. The export process uses customizable templates, so you can align output with your team’s needs or regulatory requirements. It’s a great way to save time while keeping your documentation consistent and audit-ready.

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.