2025 Outlook with Cristian Amitroaie, Founder and CEO of AMIQ EDA

Tell us a little bit about yourself and 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 2024 for your company?

Our most exciting innovation for the year was our first incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) Into our products. As Serban Ionica discussed in October, AI Assistant is included for no extra cost in the latest releases of DVT IDE for Visual Studio (VS) Code and DVT Eclipse IDE. It works with any large language model (LLM) to generate new design or verification code and to explain and improve existing code. The results are much better than with a general-purpose AI tool because we leverage our project database and its deep knowledge about your design and testbench. Users are telling us that we have really improved their coding and debug efficiency.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2024?

Two of the challenges I mentioned last year continue as our company and user base continue to grow. Of course, growth is good, but it does make it harder to provide rapid and accurate customer support and to hire enough of the best people to evolve our products and develop new ones.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge?

I believe that AI Assistant helps with customer support, since it enables users to ask questions about their code in natural language.  The more intuitive the user interface, the fewer questions users have to ask. We continue to create very popular “how to” videos and we have started a new series of posts on common pitfalls in SystemVerilog. As for hiring, the internship program I mentioned last year has been an incredible success. It takes a lot of time and effort to make it work so well, but many of our interns join us full time when they graduate and are productive from the first day. We also recruit through job fairs and social media, but the internship program is our largest and best source for new employees.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2024 will be, and why?

We are seeing a big upturn in VS Code interest among users. We are also seeing increased usage for our Verissimo SystemVerilog Linter and Specador documentation generator. I certainly expect AI to be a growth area as well. AI Assistant is getting more capable all the time, and we’ll be applying AI wherever we can to improve our entire product line.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?

Of course, we’re always adding new features to all our products. For example, our DVT IDE family now smoothly handles preprocessor code, even when it’s in a proprietary language. Also, we’ve added more than 70 new rules to Verissimo over the past year. On the AI side, we work with domain experts to educate our team and ensure that we’re using all the latest relevant tools and technologies.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

We attended and exhibited at our usual in-person events: the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in the U.S. and the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in the U.S. and Europe. Traffic was better than last year, showing that engineers are comfortable traveling to conferences again and that their companies have the budget to send them. We also attended Open Community Experience (OCX), the Eclipse Foundation’s flagship developer conference. We heard about a lot of interesting topics in the open source community, from IDEs of the future to cyber resilience.

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

We expect even better traffic this year, so we plan to attend the same three events. We always enjoy catching up with users, friends, and colleagues while seeing some new faces as well.

Additional questions or final comments?

I said a year ago that 2024 should be another outstanding year for us, and indeed it was. I fully expect the same for 2025. We’ll continue to provide regular updates to SemiWiki on what’s happening at AMIQ EDA. Thank you for your time.

Also Read:

Adding an AI Assistant to a Hardware Language IDE

Writing Better Code More Quickly with an IDE and Linting

AMIQ EDA Integrated Development Environment #61DAC

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