In this work, we proposed a voltage-to-current cell based on a Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) inverter designed by using floating gate transistors. We demonstrate its usefulness for the design of stair-type and sawtooth functions to be used in the implementation of a multiscroll chaotic oscillator. The main advantage of using floating gate transistors to design the nonlinear functions is the elimination of external reference DC sources, as is typically done in most of the nonlinear functions that generate multiscroll attractors. The key guidelines for the design of our proposed voltage-to-current cell are given to provide good performances in the design of an integrated multiscroll chaotic oscillator. HSPICE simulations are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed cell to generate multiscroll attractors. Finally, simulation results before and after layout are presented to show the good agreement with respect to theoretical results. HSPICE simulations of the post-layout design are in accordance with the system behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.