Simple Autonomous Chaotic Circuits

Over the last several decades, numerous electronic circuits exhibiting chaos have been proposed. Nonautonomous circuits with as few as two physical components have been developed. However, the operation of such circuits has typically traded physical simplicity for analytic complexity, or vice versa. In this brief, we present two simple autonomous chaotic circuits using only op-amps and linear time-invariant passive components. Each circuit employs one op-amp as a comparator to provide signum nonlinearity. The chaotic behavior is robust, and the circuits offer simple analysis, while minimizing both physical and model component counts.