DesignCon Best Paper Awards recognize outstanding contributions to the educational goals of the DesignCon program. Papers are judged both on the merits of the written document and on the quality of their presentation. The awards serve to acknowledge the authors who receive them as leading practitioners in semiconductor and electronic design. The awards also provide incentive to authors to produce high-quality DesignCon papers and present them in a lucid and compelling manner.

DesignCon Best Paper Awards recipients are selected through a two-step process. The first step is a review of the full-length papers accepted for the current year's program. Members of the DesignCon Technical Program Committee rate these papers based on quality, relevance, impact, originality, and lack of commercial content, which determines the finalists. While selection as a finalist for a DesignCon Best Paper Awards is a notable achievement in itself, winners are then chosen from the finalists based on the quality of their presentations as judged by attendee feedback collected during the conference.

An additional “Early-Career Best Paper Award” was introduced in 2020. The goal of this award is to encourage and recognize excellence in the challenging task of creating a technical paper. Papers where the lead author has a maximum of seven years of professional experience are nominated as finalists, and one is chosen as the Early-Career Best Paper Award winner based on attendee ratings of the presentations.