This paper investigates a new type of intermittency from a ring of four coupled phase-locked loops (PLL's). This system can be represented by a six-dimensional nonlinear autonomous differential equation that has a four-dimensional invariantmanifold named H. With a quasi-attractive property, this invariant manifold causes a type of intermittency. Namely, long laminar phases in H and short bursts out of H alternate irregularly. Different from the well-known on-off intermittency, the core ofthis intermittency is not a chaotic set in H, but two kinds of semistable periodic orbits in H called the entrance set and the exit set. We try to clarify the mechanism of this intermittency by using bifurcation analysis of these periodic orbits.
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