2024 Outlook with Cristian Amitroaie, Founder and CEO of AMIQ...

SemiWki has been working with AMIQ EDA for more than four years now and it has been quite the education. AMIQ EDA is a company that specializes in providing development and verification solutions for digital design and verification teams in the semiconductor industry. They offer a range of products and services aimed at improving productivity, efficiency, and quality in the design and verification process.

AMIQ EDA’s tools are widely used by semiconductor companies, design houses, and verification teams worldwide to streamline their development and verification processes, reduce time-to-market, and ensure the reliability of their designs.

Tell us a little bit about your company.
We are an EDA company providing software tools targeting both chip design and chip verification. Our tools enable engineers to increase the speed and quality of new code development, simplify debugging and legacy code maintenance, accelerate language and methodology learning, improve testbench reliability, extract automatically accurate documentation, and implement best coding practices.

What was the most exciting high point of 2023 for your company?
As my co-founders mentioned in an interview with you in July, 2023 was the twentieth anniversary of AMIQ, consisting of AMIQ EDA and AMIQ Consulting. Although lots of great things happened last year, our celebration stands out the most. We have wonderful customers, and we are honored that they have been so supportive for more than two decades.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2023?
There were really three challenges:

Continuing to provide strong customer support as our user base increased significantly
Maintaining quality as the number of our products, features, and use models grew
Hiring the right people to deliver on our product evolution, quality, and support

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge?
For customer support, we’re investing in leveraged assets such as more intuitive user interfaces, more detailed documentation, and demo movies showing how to use our tools. We increased our investment in product quality by growing our QA team and enhancing our regression test suites. On the hiring side, we’ve found that an extensive internship program is a great way to find and train the best engineers.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2024 will be, and why?
Our Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will remain our flagship product, but use of our other tools has been growing rapidly. Our Verissimo SystemVerilog linter has been widely adopted as people realize that the minimal code checking done by other tools is insufficient for enduring quality and correctness. We’re also seeing increased interest in our Specador documentation generator.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?
We’re always adding more features to DVT IDE, in parallel on both the Visual Studio (VS) Code and Eclipse platforms. Verissimo is evolving at a rapid pace as we offer dozens of new rules every year, many of them suggested by our users. In addition, we have a major new release of Specador offering more ways to autogenerate high-quality documentation from user code.

What conferences did you attend in 2023 and how was the traffic?
We were glad to be able to return to in-person events last year. We exhibited at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in the U.S., the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in the U.S. and Europe, and ChipEX in Israel. Traffic was generally quite good, although I doubt that we will ever get back to the “good old days” of bigger travel budgets and no pandemic concerns.

Will you attend conferences in 2024? Same or more?
At this point, we are planning to attend the same events. For us, conferences are less about generating new leads and more about connecting face-to-face with our users. We’re always prepared to show demos of new features and provide on-the-spot customer support. It’s great to see old friends and meet new ones, so I think that conferences will continue to be important for us.

Additional questions or final comments?
2023 was a truly great year for AMIQ EDA, and I have every expectation that 2024 will be outstanding as well. We’ll continue to be very busy enhancing our products and keeping up with new versions of the many standards we support. I’ll keep you updated with our regular chats. Thank you for the chance to share our thoughts.