Investigating the Properties of Self-Organization and Synchronization in Electronic Systems

Nonlinear cooperative behavior appears naturally in many systems, such as cardiac cell oscillations; cellular calcium oscillations; oscillatory chemical reactions, and fireflies. Such systems have been studied in detail due to their inherent properties of robustness, adaptability, scalability, and emergence. In this paper, such nonlinear cooperative behaviors are considered within the domain of electronic system design. We investigate these desirable properties in a system composed of electronic oscillators. The paper presents a series of circuit simulation results showing that self-organizing principles, which can be emulated in an electronic circuit, enable the systems to show a phase transition to synchronization, in a manner similar to those of natural systems. Circuit simulation results presented here show that the circuits are robust to the unreliable performance of the electronic oscillators and tolerant to their run-time faults. These are important findings for future engineering applications in which the system's elements are likely to be unreliable and faulty, such as in molecular- and nanoelectronic systems.