Driving Innovation: Mechanical and Optical Processes During Rigid-flex Production
It’s Only Common Sense: Your Biggest Competitor Is Complacency
The Chemical Connection: Onshoring PCB Production—Daunting but Certainly Possible
Samtec’s Richard Mellitz Named Engineer of the Year at DesignCon 2022
April 7, 2022 | Business WireEstimated reading time: 3 minutes
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:
Share on:
Testimonial
"We’re proud to call I-Connect007 a trusted partner. Their innovative approach and industry insight made our podcast collaboration a success by connecting us with the right audience and delivering real results."
Julia McCaffrey - NCAB GroupSuggested Items
I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
10/31/2025 | Nolan Johnson, I-Connect007Last week, the IMPACT conference took place in Taipei, bringing together advanced packaging experts from around the globe to share their knowledge. We’ll be bringing you post-conference coverage over the next few weeks, so look for that in our newsletters, and in the Advanced Electronic Packaging Digest. Other news seemed to have the U.S. at the center of the global discussions. My picks start in Phoenix, where TSMC, NVIDIA, and Amkor are all scrambling to establish new capabilities. There’s nothing like a strong demand signal to cause build-out, and AI chips are doing exactly that.
I-Connect007 Welcomes New Columnist: Leo Lambert, EPTAC
10/30/2025 | I-Connect007I-Connect007 is excited to announce a column by Leo Lambert, an industry veteran with 40 years of experience, an award winner, and technical director at EPTAC. This column, Learning With Leo, will explore the evolution and related challenges of electronics product assembly, especially as it relates to training.
Better Sustainability Policies for Electronics
10/29/2025 | Diana Radovan, Global Electronics AssociationI joined the Global Electronics Association in August 2025 as the director of sustainability policy. Since then, much has happened in terms of geopolitics and in the development and re-envisioning of sustainability policies in the industry. While the European Commission has released several legislative packages to simplify sustainability requirements (“omnibus”), these developments haven’t yet settled and are not in effect. Given the many recent and ongoing public consultations, with often conflicting input from a broad range of stakeholders, final negotiations remain rather polarized among policymakers.
SMTAI 2025 Review: Reflecting on a Pragmatic and Forward-looking Industry
10/27/2025 | Marcy LaRont, I-Connect007Leaving the show floor on the final afternoon of SMTA International last week in Rosemont, Illinois, it was clear that the show remains a grounded, technically driven event that delivers a solid program, good networking, and an easy space to commune with industry colleagues and meet with customers.
Come Together: Tom Marktscheffel Used Data to Build CFX and a Global Factory Standard
10/27/2025 | Sandy Gentry, Community MagazineWhen Tom Marktscheffel, director of product management software solutions at ASMPT, looks back on his nearly three decades in electronics manufacturing, one word stands out: data. “Data is the new gold,” he says. Without it, automation, artificial intelligence, and the factory of the future are impossible. With it, the industry can move from manual, error-prone processes to smart, connected systems that make real-time decisions.