Lambert (Bert) Simonovich is the founder and principal consultant of Lamsim Enterprises Inc., and his expertise in high-speed signal integrity, backplane design, characterization, and modeling has helped shape the advancement of high-speed electronic systems. His pioneering contributions, including the development of the widely adopted "Cannonball" roughness model for transmission line loss modeling, have advanced signal integrity analysis and influenced the design methodologies used throughout the industry.

Over a distinguished 32-year career at Bell Northern Research/Nortel, Bert helped pioneer advanced technology solutions from research into commercial products while holding a variety of engineering, research, and development roles. Since founding Lamsim Enterprises Inc. in 2009, he has continued to support the engineering community as a consultant, author, mentor, and educator. A Senior Member of IEEE, Keysight Certified Expert, longtime member of DesignCon's Technical Program Committee, mentor for DesignCon's first-time lead authors, and member of the Signal Integrity Journal Editorial Advisory Board, Bert has also received six DesignCon Best Paper Awards and one Best Paper Finalist Award, reflecting his longstanding commitment to technical excellence and innovation. Read more about Bert in an interview with Design News.

Read more about Bert in an interview with Design News.

Benjamin Dannan is the founder and chief technologist at Signal Edge Solutions, and his expertise in signal and power integrity, particularly in the design, modeling, and measurement of advanced semiconductor packages, has set new industry standards. His vision for integrating cutting-edge techniques in power integrity with emerging technologies ensures that the industry remains at the forefront of technological advancements.

Ben is a trained Electronic Warfare Officer in the USAF with deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and a trained USAF Cyber Operations Officer. He is a dedicated mentor and leader and actively supports the professional development of his colleagues and the broader engineering community. He is a member of the Technical Program Committee, a senior member of IEEE, and an experienced signal and power integrity (SI/PI) design consultant, advancing high-performance ASICs and developing advanced packaging solutions for high-speed digital designs. Ben has twice received the prestigious DesignCon Best Paper Award.

For the $1000 grant that is part of this award, Ben has designated the recipient to be the Center for Signal Integriy at Penn State Harrisburg.

Read more about Ben in an interview with Design News.

Casey is committed to engineering products that solve real-world connectivity problems and do so in a manner that provides customers with actionable fleet diagnostics and ease-of-use features. Casey has been instrumental in guiding the industry through the transition from 10Gbps Ethernet to 800Gbps Ethernet and 8Gbps PCI Express (PCIe) to 32Gbps Compute Express Link (CXL). Casey has authored multiple white papers on 50G/100G PAM-4 technologies that discuss practical aspects of Signal Integrity. He is a leading authority on PCIe technologies and was chosen by PCI-SIG as its Retimer spokesperson. Casey has hosted multiple webinars, authored several often-cited white papers, and produced many videos geared towards educating the industry.

Casey donated the $1,000 Engineer of the Year Award grant he received to the ECE department at the University of Florida.

Read more about Casey in an interview with Design News.

Steve Sandler has been active in power system engineering for more than 40 years and started PICOTEST.com in 2010 specializing in high fidelity testing and measurement tools, primarily for power-related applications. Sandler also leads workshops internationally on power supply and founded AEi Systems, which aids in worst case circuit analysis and troubleshooting of high reliability systems. His latest book, titled Power Integrity Using ADS, was published in 2019. Sandler is very active in the DesignCon community and has been a member of the DesignCon Technical Program Committee for many years, taking part in the rigorous reviews of all call-for-paper submissions and completed papers for quality and relevance. He received a Best Paper Award in 2017 and encourages excellence in others by mentoring new DesignCon authors.

Learn more about Steve in an interview with Design News.

Richard Mellitz researched measuring and analyzing electrical signals long before signal integrity gained recognition as a key engineering requirement. He is presently a distinguished engineer at Samtec, supporting interconnect signal integrity and industry standards. He has been a key contributor to the channel sections IEEE802.3 backplane and cabling standards and for the time domain ISI and return loss standards for IEEE802.3 Ethernet, known as COM (Channel Operating Margin) and ERL (Effective Return Loss), which are now an integral part of Ethernet standards due to Rich's leadership. He holds many patents in interconnect, signal integrity, design, and test, and has delivered numerous signal integrity papers at electronic industry design conferences.

Richard provided his Engineer of the Year grant to the Center of Excellence in Signal Integrity at Penn State Harrisburg.

Click here to view Richard’s acceptance speech, and here to view a Design News interview with Richard.

Dr. Cathy Ye Liu, distinguished engineer and director, currently heads up Broadcom SerDes architecture and modeling group. Previously she worked as R&D director and distinguished engineer in Avago/LSI which acquired Broadcom. Since 2002, she has been working on high-speed transceiver solutions. Prior to this, she developed read channel and mobile digital TV receiver solutions. Her technical interests are signal processing, FEC, and modeling in high-speed optical and electrical transceiver solutions. She has published many journal and conference papers and holds 20+ US patents.

For the grant, Cathy has chosen the recipient to be the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at University of California, Davis, in order “to help young engineering students to grow.“

Learn more about Cathy in her interview with Design News.

Istvan Novak has single handedly helped the test and measurement industry develop completely new instruments and methods of measurement. A Life Fellow of the IEEE with 25 patents to his name, he has authored two books on power integrity, teaches signal and power integrity courses, and maintains a popular SI/PI website. He contributes to educating and helping engineers across the world with their SI/PI problems and actively mentors new engineers in his company. Istvan offers congratulations to all the finalists, saying that any one of them could have easily won the title.

Learn more about Istvan in an interview on DesignNews.com.

Vishram Pandit's goal is simple: Share knowledge with the technical community that will one day create the CPUs for next-generation cars, phones, and servers. He is well on his way to making that happen; to date he has co-authored a book on Power Integrity for I/O Interfaces, and is co-author of approximately 30 conference and journal publications, out of which 19 were presented at DesignCon. Those papers have received 3 best paper awards and 3 finalist awards. Vishram received the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Signal and Power integrity field.

Learn more about Vishram in his interview with Design News.

After delivering 19 years’ worth of tutorials and technical papers at DesignCon, Mike Peng Li, Intel Corp. Fellow, says the conference has become part of him. Mike has published approximately 110 technical papers, has earned 30 patents, has been named an IEEE Fellow, and has guided thousands of engineers, scientists, and students with his books and tutorials, especially in the area of jitter.

Read an interview with Dr. Li to learn more about his exceptional career.

Heidi Barnes is well known for her ability to solve problems in the signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) field for Fortune 500 companies. She was selected for the award, in part, because of her dedication to problem solving and enthusiasm for leading and collaborating with teams.

Read more about Heidi in an interview following the reception of her award.

Eric was invited to present at the first DesignCon back in 1991 and has been doing so ever since. He says that the two essential ingredients to effective teaching are understanding what is confusing to the student, and encouraging participation and engagement. To foster the latter, Eric is known, to everyone’s entertainment, for throwing chocolates out to students when they participate.

From communications analysis to IC design to microwave to software and more, Mike Steinberger has done a lot in his impressive career. At the time he was named the first DesignCon Engineer of the Year, Mike was responsible for leading SiSoft’s ongoing tool development effort for the design and analysis of serial links in the 5-30 Gbps range, and had been instrumental in the development of high speed digital backplanes at various industry leaders.  In the photo, Mike (middle) celebrates with his SiSoft co-workers and Chiphead after receiving his award.