Multiple time scale chaos in a Schmitt trigger circuit.

It is known that stray radio frequency signals can produce nonlinear effects that disrupt the operation of circuits, but the mechanisms by which this disruption occurs are not well known. In this paper, an emitter coupled Schmitt trigger circuit is driven with a high-frequency signal to look for disruptive effects. As the circuit makes a transition between mode locked states (period 2 and period 3, for example), there is a region of chaos in which the largest peak in the power spectrum is in between the mode-locked frequencies, and is not related to the driving frequency by an integer multiple. This chaos resembles the chaos seen during a period adding sequence, except that it contains frequencies ranging over many orders of magnitude, from the driving frequencies on the order of megahertz, down to a few hertz. It is found that only a one-transistor circuit is necessary to produce this extremely broadband chaos, and true quasiperiodicity is not seen in this circuit. The single-transistor circuit is then simulated to confirm the frequency conversion effects.