Recently, designing hyperchaotic maps with complex dynamics has attracted increasing attention from various research fields. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional (2D) exponential chaotic system (2D-ECS). The 2D-ECS can generate a large number of hyperchaotic maps by cascading exponential nonlinearity with bounded functions. To show the effectiveness of the 2D-ECS, we provide three hyperchaotic maps by cascading the exponential nonlinearity with trigonometric functions. We first build state-mapping networks with different fixed-point arithmetic precisions to analyze the dynamic properties of the hyperchaotic maps in digital domain, and then study their dynamic properties using several numerical measurements. Experimental results show that the generated hyperchaotic maps show better performance indicators than existing chaotic maps. Moreover, a hardware platform is constructed to implement the three hyperchaotic maps generated by the 2D-ECS and two-channel hyperchaotic sequences are experimentally captured. A pseudo-random number generator is designed to study the potential applications of our proposed hyperchaotic maps. Finally, we apply the generated hyperchaotic maps to secure communication, and experimental results show that these maps exhibit better performance in contrast to existing chaotic maps.