The Next Big Things in Chip & Board Design

DesignCon is celebrating excellence in semiconductor and electronic design, thanks to the engineering community!

DesignCon has just announced the winners of the 2024 Best Paper Award, recognizing outstanding contributions to the educational goals of the DesignCon program. The winners were chosen based on attendee ratings of the presentations, with the results compiled and winners chosen after the 2024 event. The authors are recognized as leading practitioners in semiconductor and electronic design, according to show organizers.

DesignCon is also celebrating Casey Morrison, chief product officer and co-founder of Silicon Valley-based Astera Labs, recognized as the 2024 Engineer of the Year. “This is a great honor to be recognized by the DesignCon community with whom I’ve been working for well over a decade,” Morrison told Design News after the recognition. "I consider each professional relationship I’ve built with vendors, partners, and customers to be a special accomplishment for me personally.”

DesignCon has a rich legacy of honoring and encouraging innovation. "DesignCon is the place where we not only look toward the future and what innovations are on the horizon, but also look back at some of the great work that has been done by the best and brightest," said Suzanne Deffree, Group Event Director, in a news release. "We commend every winner and finalist from each category and recognize them for their relentless innovation and collaborative spirit. Their dedication to the industry continues to reshape our business and is the backbone of modern technology.”

The 2024 Best Paper Award Winners:

200+ Gbps Ethernet Forward Error Correction (FEC) Analysis, Cathy Ye Liu, Broadcom Inc.

A Heuristic Approach to Assess Anisotropic Properties of Glass-reinforced PCB, Lambert (Bert) Simonovich, Lamsim Enterprises Inc.

A Novel PCB Footprint for Double-Sides Press-fit Stacked Optical Module Application, authors from Cisco Systems Inc.

Are 1.0 mm Precision RF Connectors Really Required for 224 Gbps PAM4 Verification? authors from Samtec Corporation, University of L’Aquila and Keysight Technologies.

Design, Simulation, and Validation Challenges of a Scalable 2000 Amp Core Power Rail, authors from Picotest.com, Signal Edge Solutions, Keysight Technologies, Broadcom Semiconductors and Monolithic Power Systems.

Impact of Finite Interconnect Impedance Including Spatial and Domain Comparison of PDN Characterization, authors from Amazon, Cadence, Samtec, Oracle and consultant Mario Rotigni.

Practical SI EM Simulator Using Neural Language Models, authors from Missouri S&T, Zhejiang University and Cisco.

System Design Methodology, Simulation and Silicon Validation of a 224 Gbps Serial Link, authors from Synopsys.

DesignCon also celebrates excellent work from emerging professionals with the Early-Career Best Paper Award, first introduced in 2020. Contenders are within the first seven years of their career, and the award aims to encourage engineering growth and development through collaboration and knowledge sharing, according to organizers.

The 2024 Early-Career Best Paper Award Winner:

Applying Techniques of Transfer and Active Learning to Practical PCB Noise Decoupling, authors from Hamburg University of Technology, Celestica, and d-Matrix Corp.

The full list of winning papers and contributing authors as well as a description of the awards process can be found at the DesignCon Best Papers Awards page.

Next year DesignCon will be celebrating its 30th anniversary at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Jan. 28-30, 2025. The 2024 Best Paper Award winners will be celebrated at the event.

DesignCon is organized by Informa, publisher of Design News and Battery Technology Online, the official publications of DesignCon.