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February 2-4, 2027
Santa Clara Convention Center
Santa Clara, CA
February 2-4, 2027
Santa Clara Convention Center
Santa Clara, CA
DesignCon's "Engineer of the Year" Award is given out each year during the DesignCon event. The award seeks to recognize the best of the best in engineering and new product advancements at the chip, board, or system level.
The award winner is selected based on his or her leadership, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking brought to design/test of chips, boards, or systems, with particular attention paid to areas of signal and power integrity.
Senior Staff Hardware & Signal/Power Integrity Engineer, Broadcom
Strategic Technologist,Samtec
President and Founder,Simberian
Signal Integrity Consultant | Backplane Specialist |Founder, Lamsim Enterprises
Individual Bios
Idan Ben Ezra
Idan Ben Ezra is a Senior Staff Hardware and Signal/Power Integrity Engineer at Broadcom, with over a decade of experience in high-speed hardware design, power integrity, and system-level simulations for advanced computing platforms.
At Broadcom, Idan focuses on board and package design for the Core Switching Group in San Jose, serving as a technical focal point for full-system Power Delivery Network (PDN) architecture and analysis. His work spans the complete power path from PCB through socket, package, interposer, and die - addressing IR drop, PDN impedance, and time-domain transient response across worst-case operating corners.
Idan has developed lab-correlated PI co-simulation methodologies and automation flows that enable accurate, scalable validation of high-current systems.
Idan brings strong hands-on expertise in power rail measurements and simulation-to-lab correlation, ensuring that analytical models reflect real-world behavior in complex, high-performance designs.
Previously, Idan worked at Valens, where he played a key role as a board designer and high-speed simulation engineer for automotive-grade, high-speed silicon platforms.
Idan is a recognized thought leader in the power integrity community.
He has co-authored numerous DesignCon papers and received the DesignCon Best Paper Award (2024).
In 2025, he was recognized as one of DesignCon’s 40 Under 40, awarded to emerging leaders shaping the future of the industry.
He holds a Practical Engineering degree and a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Electronics and Computer Engineering from HIT, Israel.
Scott McMorrow
Scott McMorrow currently serves as strategic technologist for Samtec’s Signal Integrity Group. As a consultant for years too numerous to mention, Scott has helped many companies develop high performance products, while training signal integrity engineers.
McMorrow started Samtec’s webinar series gEEk spEEk, providing virtual engineering learning. McMorrow also works on Samtec’s twinax technology, pushes EDA companies to focus on signal integrity, developed advanced crosstalk analysis, and power delivery methodology. Regarding gEEk spEEk, a nominator mentioned, “Samtec's gEEk spEEk stands out as some of the best modern SI education.”
McMorrow has related RF EDA to signal integrity (meshing, boundary conditions, computational space, etc.) and has a long history of supporting, speaking at, and writing for DesignCon. He received a DesignCon 2021 Best Paper Award for his work on the paper “A Case Study in the Development of a 112 Gbps-PAM4 Silicon & Connector Test Platform.”
Another nominator said, “Scott has been at the absolute forefront of PCBA Signal Integrity and Power Integrity engineering, likely for more than 30 years. He is widely recognized as perhaps the preeminent authority for technical exchanges on the SI-LIST. He is truly an industry thought leader within the EE community.”
A third nominator offered, “Everyone in SI knows Scott. Few know as much as Scott.”
Yuriy Shlepnev
Yuriy Shlepnev is president and founder of Simberian, where he develops Simbeor electromagnetic signal integrity software. He received an M.S. degree in radio engineering from Novosibirsk State Technical University and a Ph.D. in computational electromagnetics from Siberian State University of Telecommunications and Informatics. He was principal developer of the electromagnetic simulator for Eagleware Corporation and leading developer of electromagnetic software for simulation of signal and power distribution networks at Mentor Graphics. The results of his research are published in multiple papers and conference proceedings.
Shlepnev conceived and brought to market a state-of-the-art electromagnetic field solver tool suite and is considered an expert in his field and regularly posts teaching videos. He is a senior member of IEEE AP, MYY, EMC, and CPMT societies. He is also a Fellow of Kong’s Electromagnetics Academy and a member of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES).
According to his nominator, Shlepnev is a pioneer in using computational electromagnetics to solve complex problems in signal integrity, and his contributions have helped to shape the SI industry to look as it does today. As the chief developer of Simbeor, he has helped many companies to have affordable yet exceptionally accurate SI tools to solve their engineering challenges and get designs right the first time. Another nominator agrees, “[Simbeor] dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for GHz-rate SI analysis.”
Shlepnev has been actively involved in the Technical Program Committee for DesignCon for many years and has served as track co-chair in the past. He has received two DesignCon Best Paper Awards. He is chief developer of several commercial EM solvers and a key contributor to the SI-list.
Lambert (Bert) Simonovich
Lambert (Bert) Simonovich graduated from Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, as an Electronic Engineering Technologist. Over a 32-year career working at Bell Northern Research/Nortel in Ottawa Canada, he helped pioneer several advanced technology solutions into products. He has held a variety of engineering, research, and development positions, eventually specializing in high-speed signal integrity and backplane design.
Simonovich is passionate about high-speed signal integrity, characterization, and modeling. He has authored/coauthored several publications and received 7 Best Paper Awards and 1 Best Paper Finalist Award at DesignCon from 2009-2024. In addition to being an established innovator, with two patent grants and three patent applications, he invented the "Cannonball" roughness model, used in conjunction with the Huray model for transmission line loss modeling, which has been adopted in several popular EDA tools.
In 2009, Simonovich founded Lamsim Enterprises Inc., where he continues to provide innovative signal integrity and backplane solutions as a consultant. In addition to being a senior member of IEEE and a Keysight Certified Expert, he has served for many years as a member of DesignCon's Technical Program Committee, is a mentor for DesignCon’s first-time lead authors, and is on Signal Integrity Journal's Editorial Advisory Board.
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.
Learn about all of the 2025 Engineer of the Year finalists.
We have been pleased to honor these Engineer of the Year Award recipients
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.
