A universal circuit for studying chaos in Chua's circuit family

The author presents a canonical piecewise-linear circuit capable of realizing every member of Chua's circuit family. It contains only six two-terminal elements; five of them are linear resistors, capacitors, and inductors, and only one element is a three-segment piecewise-linear resistor. It is canonical in the sense that: it can exhibit all possible phenomena associated with any three-region symmetric piecewise-linear continuous vector field, and it contains the minimum number of circuit elements needed for such a circuit. Using this circuit, many chaotic attractors which have not been observed before have been found. Among them, the author reports on a special example: a nonfractal chaotic attractor.<>