Recognizing Elegant Circuit Design [President's Corner]

CaMKII Structure—An Elegant Design

Crystal structures of protein kinases continue to reveal new mechanisms for the regulation of catalytic activity of these enzymes. In this issue of Cell, Rosenberg et al. (2005) report the structure of the catalytic and regulatory domains of CaMKII, a protein kinase important in the cellular response to changes in intracellular calcium ion concentration. This study provides new mechanistic insi...

An Elegant Circuit for Balancing Risk and Reward

Animals constantly encounter conflicting cues in natural environments. To survive and thrive, they must make appropriate behavioral decisions. In this issue, Ghosh et al. (2016) identified a neural circuit underlying multisensory threat-reward decision making using an elegant C. elegans model.

Making Sense of Elegant Complexity in Design

level. It also helps build function failure logic, facilitating the reasoning about potential faults and their propagation through the system. FFIP reveals mappings that are otherwise difficult to see in complex systems and provides an elegant simulation environment for early design stage analysis, and as such, makes reliability and risk analysis possible during the qualitative stages of design...

Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor-Only Process Corner Monitoring Circuit

A process corner monitoring circuit (PCMC) is presented in this work. The circuit generates a signal, the logical value of which depends on the process corner only. The signal can be used in both digital and analog circuits for testing and compensation of process variations (PV). The presented circuit uses only metal-oxidesemiconductor (MOS) transistors, which allow increasing its detection acc...

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Death: Closing the Constitution's Succession Gap