Samtec’s Richard Mellitz Named Engineer of the Year at DesignCon 2022

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Richard Mellitz, distinguished engineer at Samtec, was selected by peers as recipient of the 2022 Engineer of the Year Award. Amongst a field of brilliant and renowned engineers, Mellitz took home the well-earned title for his nearly 40 years as an engineer, producing work that has changed the course of interconnect signal integrity and industry standards. The award ceremony took place April 7 during DesignCon at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

"We could not be more excited to welcome Richard Mellitz into the Engineer of the Year hall of fame," remarked Suzanne Deffree, Group Event Director, DesignCon. "His work plays a significant role in changing the direction of the industry and shaping much-needed progress as emergent high-speed digital technologies and societal change continues to bring new challenges to the application of signal integrity. Congratulations on the well-deserved win, Richard."

Finalists for the Engineer of the year award were selected by the editors of Design News and DesignCon staff, and the DesignCon community voted the winner. DesignCon will present a $1,000 grant or scholarship to the educational institution of Mellitz’s choice in recognition of his achievements. 

"It's an honor to be the recipient of this year's Engineer of the Year Award—a well-known and highly respected distinction in our industry," said Mellitz. "This year's applicant pool was outstanding, showcasing the breadth of talent and ingenuity foundational to industry advancement. Thank you to the DesignCon team for organizing such a successful event and for the award recognition; I'm truly appreciative."

Mellitz is presently a distinguished engineer at Samtec, supporting interconnect signal integrity and industry standards. Before this, he was a principal engineer in the Platform Engineering Group at Intel. Richard was a principal member of various Intel processor and I/O bus teams, including Itanium, Pentium, PCI Express, SAS, and Fabric (Ethernet, IB, and proprietary). Additionally, Mellitz 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 his leadership.

Mellitz founded and chaired an IPC committee delivering IPC's first PCB loss test method. Prior to this, he led industry efforts at IPC to deliver the first TDR (time domain reflectometry) standard, which is presently used throughout the PCB industry. Richard holds many patents in interconnect, signal integrity, design, and test. He has delivered numerous signal integrity papers at electronic industry design conferences.

Finalists for the 2022 Award include:

• Scott McMorrow, CTO 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.
• Steve Sandler, founder of Picotest.com, has been involved with power system engineering for more than 40 years. Steve is the founder of PICOTEST.com, a company specializing in power integrity solutions, including measurement products, services, and training. Steve is a long-time and very active member of the DesignCon Technical Program Committee.
• Lambert (Bert) Simonovich, founder of Lamsim Enterprises, has worked at Bell Northern Research/Nortel in Ottawa, Canada, where he helped pioneer several advanced technology solutions into products. In 2009, he founded Lamsim Enterprises Inc., where he continues to provide innovative signal integrity and backplane solutions as a consultant. He has authored several publications and is the holder of two US patents. In addition to being a senior member of IEEE, he currently serves as a member of DesignCon's Technical Program Committee, EDICon's Technical Advisory Committee and Signal Integrity Journal's Editorial Advisory Board.

RELATED VIDEO—Mellitz discussing his award:

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