AI PCB Design: Turning a 100-Page Spec Into an MCU Shortlist

Marco Witzmann, Head of Requirements Portal at Altium, returns to the Altium OnTrack Podcast to show host Zach Peterson what the tool formerly known as Requirements Manager has become. In a live demo, Marco starts from a plain-language email about a wind-farm inspection drone and watches the new engineering assistant turn it into properly formulated requirements, complete with TBD placeholders instead of invented numbers. From there he breaks a high-level product spec down into mechanical, electronics, and flight software specifications, with parent-child links and full traceability generated automatically. Every change is proposed first and applied only when you approve it, so the agent never silently rewrites your project.

The heart of the episode is the workflow every PCB designer recognizes: you are handed a hundred-page IMU specification and told to pick the MCU. Marco drag-and-drops the PDF into the AI-assisted importer, lets it separate real requirements from tables of contents and revision history, then asks the agent which requirements actually drive MCU selection. The answer comes back as a clean parameter-and-value spec — supply voltage, ambient temperature range, power budget, clock speed, end-to-end latency — linked back to the originals, and ready to drop straight into an Octopart parametric search. Marco and Zach also dig into what AI should and should not decide for you, why requirements work is really about faster iteration rather than perfect first drafts, how skills let a team standardize the way requirements get written, and what is next on the roadmap: API access, simpler ECAD integration, and per-project access control.

📚 More from this Episode:- Altium Requirements Portal: https://www.altium.com/capabilities/requirements/requirements-management- Requirements & Systems Portal documentation: https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-365/requirements-portal - Altium 365: https://www.altium.com/altium-365 - Octopart parametric search: https://octopart.com - The Nexar API: https://nexar.com/api - Requirements in an Altium Designer project (ECAD integration): https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/requirements - Altium Develop pricing and subscriptions: https://www.altium.com/develop/pricing - Connect with Marco Witzmann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcowitzmann/

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