Numerical Sensitivity Analysis and Hardware Verification of a Transiently-Chaotic Attractor

We introduce a new chaotic system with nonhyperbolic equilibrium and study its sensitivity to different numerical integration techniques prior to implementing it on an FPGA. We show that the discretization method used in numerically integrating the set of differential equations in MATLAB and Mathematica does not yield chaotic behavior except when a low accuracy Euler method is used. More accurate higher-order numerical algorithms (such as midpoint and fourth-order Runge–Kutta) result in divergence in both MATLAB and Mathematica (but not Python), which agrees with the divergence observed in an analog circuit implementation of the system. However, a fixed-point digital FPGA implementation confirms the chaotic behavior of the system using Euler and fourth-order Runge–Kutta realizations. Therefore, the increased sensitivity of chaotic systems with nonhyperbolic equilibrium should be carefully considered for reproducibility.