Requirements Capture Requirements describe the intended functionality of the FPGA/ASIC, and they are the basis of all design and verification activities. Requirements Capture is the process of gathering and authoring the intended functionalities of the FPGA design as textual requirements. Errors that are produced during this process, if undetected, tend to propagate to the later stages of the development cycle resulting to bugs and incomplete functionalities. That is why successful development teams have systematic processes in place giving them full control over the requirements from start to finish of the project. Spec-TRACER enables development teams to have full control over the requirements with the following features: Manual capture within the Spec-TRACER tool environment eliminating management of external files such as MS Word and Excel. Import requirements from external files: DOC, XLS, CSV or DOORS Full configuration management control at the requirements level including version number, author and date creation. Create and assign requirements attributes to give context to characteristics and importance Compare and track multiple versions of requirements Baseline requirements Review requirements against a checklist Spec-TRACER provides a state-of-the-art GUI where requirements are authored, managed and tracked. As illustrated below, requirements code, name, description (textual, graphics or tables) and attributes are all captured within the tool environment. Attributes such as Safety Impact, Review Status, Cost, Priority and Verification are all user-configurable giving requirements more meaning essential to project management. Spec-TRACER provides Requirements Reviewer facilitating review activities against a checklist. Users are able to record the review activities more efficiently including the item under review, personnel conducting the review, date of review, review status and corrective action items. Spec-TRACER enables users create a baseline once a project milestone is completed. Users are able to compare baselines at the requirements level including traceability. Users are able to analyze requirement changes across multiple baselines and determine which requirement versions are Identical, Differing, Existing in Baseline 1 or Existing in Baseline 2.
