Copyright © 2012 Lidan Wang and Shukai Duan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Over the last three decades, theoretical design and circuitry implementation of various chaotic generators by simple electronic circuits have been a key subject of nonlinear science. In 2008, the successful development of memristor brings new activity for this research. Memristor is a new nanometre-scale passive circuit element, which possesses memory and nonlinear characteristics. This makes it have a unique charm to attract many researchers’ interests. In this paper, memristor, for the first time, is introduced in a delayed system to design a signal generator to produce chaotic behaviour. By replacing the nonlinear function with memristors in parallel, the memristor oscillator exhibits a chaotic attractor. The simulated results demonstrate that the performance is well predicted by the mathematical analysis and supports the viability of the design.