Design of Experimental Test Setup to Study Stochastic Switching and Stochastic Resonance in Nonlinear Systems

Some non-linear circuits and devices demonstrate enhanced performance in the presence of noise, a counter-intuitive phenomenon called "Stochastic Resonance" (SR). This work reports on the development of an experimental test-setup to characterize such systems, accounting for the effective low-pass behaviour of the system front-end and the limitations of low-cost signal generators. Using our setup, we demonstrate SR in a circuit that mimics the motion of a particle in a double well potential. Our setup can be extended for similar analyses of other bistable systems such as ferroelectric and ferromagnetic devices.