This paper reports a new 3-dimensional autonomous chaotic system with four nonlinearities. The system is studied with respect to its numerical solutions in phase space, including sensitive dependence on initial conditions, equilibrium points, bifurcation, and maximal Lyapunov exponent. It is shown that the system is dissipative and has a fractional Lyapunov dimension. Besides, a basin of attraction is determined by the Newton–Raphson’s method. To show its practicality, the new system is implemented by means of an analog electronic circuit. Aperiodicity of the experimental signal is verified by means of an improved power spectral density estimator, viz., the Welch’s method. Also, the correlation dimension is estimated from the experimental time series with the result confirming that the responses are deterministic chaos. Finally, an electronic design of a secure communication application is carried out, wherein a nontrivial square wave is modulated by a master chaotic signal. The modulated signal is subsequently recovered by a slave system, and the fast convergence to zero of the information recovery error substantiates the effectiveness of the design.

Chalcogenides semiconductors are currently being studied as active layers in the development of electronic devices in the field of applied technology. In the present paper, cadmium sulfide (CdS) thin films containing nanoparticles of the same material as the active layer were produced and analyzed for their application in fabricating optoelectronic devices. CdS thin films and CdS nanoparticles were obtained via soft chemistry at low temperatures. The CdS thin film was deposited via chemical bath deposition (CBD); the CdS nanoparticles were synthesized via the precipitation method. The construction of a homojunction was completed by incorporating CdS nanoparticles on CdS thin films deposited via CBD. CdS nanoparticles were deposited using the spin coating technique, and the effect of thermal annealing on the deposited films was investigated. In the modified thin films with nanoparticles, a transmittance of about 70% and a band gap between 2.12 eV and 2.35 eV were obtained. The two characteristic phonons of the CdS were observed via Raman spectroscopy, and the CdS thin films/CdS nanoparticles showed a hexagonal and cubic crystalline structure with average crystallite size of 21.3–28.4 nm, where hexagonal is the most stable for optoelectronic applications, with roughness less than 5 nm, indicating that CdS is relatively smooth, uniform and highly compact. In addition, the characteristic curves of current-voltage for as-deposited and annealed thin films showed that the metal-CdS with the CdS nanoparticle interface exhibits ohmic behavior.

Harvesting energy from ambient vibrations to convert it into electrical energy is possible using piezoelectric elements; the energy can be stored and used to bias low power electronic devices. A lead zirconium titanate cantilever is studied as a power generator to an energy harvesting system. The optimal performance is determined in terms of power output; two different configurations of the piezoelectric element were studied: series and parallel. The maximum output power produced by the piezoelectric system was 120 mW at the operating frequency of 40 Hz across a resistive load of 70 kΩ. The useful power was capable to bias some electronic devices.

The micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) sensors are suitable devices for vibrational analysis in complex systems. The Fabry–Pérot interferometer (FPI) is used due to its high sensitivity and immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI). Here, we present the design, fabrication, and characterization of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MEMS device, which is embedded in a metallic package and connected to an optical fiber. This integrated micro-opto-electro-mechanical system (MOEMS) sensor contains a mass structure and handle layers coupled with four designed springs built on the device layer. An optical reading system using an FPI is used for displacement interrogation with a demodulation technique implemented in LabVIEW^®. The results indicate that our designed MOEMS sensor exhibits a main resonant frequency of 1274 Hz with damping ratio of 0.0173 under running conditions up to 7 g, in agreement with the analytical model. Our experimental findings show that our designed and fabricated MOEMS sensor has the potential for engineering application to monitor vibrations under high-electromagnetic environmental conditions.