“Understanding the chaotic behavior of dynamical systems is very important for many different fields. This may have its implications in cancer treatment, weather forecasting, secure communication systems and even music generation.”

For a long time, electronic circuits that exhibit chaotic behavior were discovered, rather than designed in a systematic manner. This paper introduced, in the most general and abstract way, several classes of electronic circuits that can be designed to produce chaos.

The paper introduced circuit-independent architectures which can be realized in many different ways. Furthermore, all proposed structures use only passive nonlinear devices such as diodes, which imply no power or frequency constraint on the design. The active parts were isolated in the form of sinusoidal oscillators.

A design methodology for autonomous chaotic oscillators with clear design steps was proposed in this paper. The normal design cycle of electronic circuits, which electrical engineers are familiar with, can now also be used to design the highly nonlinear chaotic oscillators with a small and identified margin of trial and error.

Chaos is a phenomena observed in nearly all nonlinear dynamical systems. Of importance is the chaotic behavior of electronic circuits, particularly for its possible use in secure communications, biomedical modelling, and cryptography.

Three conjectures regarding the simplest possible chaos-producing dynamical systems and their construction using circuit-independent architectures were proposed in the paper. An explanation of the energy transfer mechanism by which chaos is thought to be produced was also given.

I first became involved in this research during my Master’s of Science studies and on through to acquiring my Ph.D. I was intrigued by an observation which was made by two individual researchers—one from Ireland and one from Lithuania, at nearly the same time (1994-1995), regarding chaos observation in electronic oscillators. This inspired me to carry on in this direction and to transform these observations into design procedures.

Understanding the chaotic behavior of dynamical systems is very important for many different fields. This may have implications in cancer treatment, weather forecasting, secure communication systems, and even music generation.