ion into the core of electrical engineering. The second historical event in the path leading to profitably used nonlinear dynamics was the observation that chaotic systems can be synchronized without loosing their chaotic nature. This discovery of the late 1980s is the origin of the idea that emerged in the beginning of the 1990s to use Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9219(02)05252-0. signals produced by chaotic systems as carriers for transmitting information. The irregular and unpredictable nature of these signals suggested their usefulness for encrypting information, whereas their broad Fourier spectrum should result in robustness to selective fading and to narrow-band disturbances. A third step was the engineering community becoming aware that chaotic systems enjoy a mixed deterministic/stochastic nature. This had been known to mathematicians since at least the early 1970s and the resulting advanced theoretical methods have recently been incorporated in the tools employed by specialist engineers. These methodologies helped clarify that the tasks that are most likely to benefit from chaos-based techniques are those where the statistical properties of the signals are the dominant factor. The same tools were also of paramount importance in developing the quantitative models needed to effectively design nonlinear systems obeying engineering specifications. Following this evolution, this issue aims at presenting an overview of the state of the art in the application of nonlinear dynamics in electronic and information engineering, ranging from communications to electronic circuit modeling and implementation and to signal processing.