Monolithic chaotic communications system

A chaotic transmitter and a synchronized chaotic receiver have been designed in a 0.25um CMOS process. Both transmitter and receiver use conversions between voltage and time to implement nonlinear tent-map functions. The transmitter outputs chaotic pulse position modulated (C-PPM) data as a stream of 2.3V p-p pulses of <1ns duration. The chaotic receiver uses the timing information between pulses to regain the chaotic state of the transmitter. The receiver resynchronizes within five cycles in a noise-free environment if lock is lost from the transmitter. The maximum throughput is 20Mb/s and the bit error rate (BER) is < 10. The transceiver is realized on a 2.5mm x 1.5mm die and dissipates 375mW.