Border collision bifurcations in a two-dimensional piecewise smooth map from a simple switching circuit

In recent years, the study of chaotic and complex phenomena in electronic circuits has been widely developed due to the increasing number of applications. In these studies, associated with the use of chaotic sequences, chaos is required to be robust (not occurring only in a set of zero measure and persistent to perturbations of the system). These properties are not easy to be proved, and numerical simulations are often used. In this work, we consider a simple electronic switching circuit, proposed as chaos generator. The object of our study is to determine the ranges of the parameters at which the dynamics are chaotic, rigorously proving that chaos is robust. This is obtained showing that the model can be studied via a two-dimensional piecewise smooth map in triangular form and associated with a one-dimensional piecewise linear map. The bifurcations in the parameter space are determined analytically. These are the border collision bifurcation curves, the degenerate flip bifurcations, which only are allowed to occur to destabilize the stable cycles, and the homoclinic bifurcations occurring in cyclical chaotic regions leading to chaos in 1-piece.