Help DesignCon Recognize Engineering Excellence

Each year during DesignCon, we recognize an engineer who is deemed by their peers to be the best of the best in engineering and new product advancements at the chip, board, or system level. The winner will be selected based on 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. We also wish to recognize engineers who give back to the community through leadership, innovative development, and mentorship of others.

We invite Design News readers to nominate an engineer here. 

Earlier this year, we were very pleased to announce Steve Sandler as the DesignCon 2023 Engineer of the Year. Sandler (pictured below) 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. 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.

Related:DesignCon 2023 A Hotbed for Technology Discussion

Other past award winners have included Richard Mellitz in 2022, Cathy Liu in 2021, Istvan Novak in 2020, Vishram Pandit in 2019, Mike Li in 2018, Heidi Barnes in 2017, Eric Bogatin in 2016, and Mike Steinberger in 2015.

When accepting his award, Sandler recognized the four other award finalists, Walter Katz, Chief Scientist of MathWorks; Casey Morrison, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Astera Labs; Larry Smith, Principal Signal Integrity Engineer for Micron; and Kenneth Wyatt, Principal Consultant of Wyatt Technical Services LLC, all noted for their exceptional contributions to the industry.

Steve Sandler accepts the award for DesignCon 2023 Engineer of the Year from Informa Market's Naomi Price.

Nominations are open from now until November 20, 2023. To be considered for this award, nominees must be active members of the DesignCon community and cannot be employed by the same company as the winner from the previous year.

Members of the Informa DesignCon team will choose finalists from the nominees, and then the DesignCon and Design News communities will have the opportunity to vote for who will receive the 2024 Award. Watch DesignNews.com for the announcement of the finalists and voting.

The winner of DesignCon’s Engineer of the Year Award will be provided with a $1,000 grant or scholarship to present to the educational institution of their choice.

You may nominate multiple people for the award, but please only nominate each person once. Multiple people nominating the same one engineer is encouraged. Feel free to nominate yourself or another engineer.

Learn more about the award and prior winners here.

Click here to go to the Nomination Form or to see the Official Rules. 

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