Recent years have seen a general resurgence of interest in analog signal processing and computing architectures. In addition, extensive theoretical and experimental literature on chaos and analog chaotic oscillators exists. One peculiarity of these circuits is the ability to generate, despite their structural simplicity, complex spatiotemporal patterns when several of them are brought towards synchronization via coupling mechanisms. While by no means a systematic survey, this paper provides a personal perspective on this area. After briefly covering design aspects and the synchronization phenomena that can arise, a selection of results exemplifying potential applications is presented, including in robot control, distributed sensing, reservoir computing, and data augmentation. Despite their interesting properties, the industrial applications of these circuits remain largely to be realized, seemingly due to a variety of technical and organizational factors including a paucity of design and optimization techniques. Some reflections are given regarding this situation, the potential relevance to discontinuous innovation in analog circuit design of chaotic oscillators taken both individually and as synchronized networks, and the factors holding back the transition to higher levels of technology readiness.

A novel random number generation method based on chaotic sampling of regular waveform is proposed. A high speed IC truly random number generator based on this method is also presented. Simulation and experimental results, verifying the feasibility of the circuit, are given. Numerical binary data obtained according to the proposed method pass the four basic tests of FIPS-140-2, while experimental data pass the full NIST-800-22 random number test suite without post-processing.