Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

A robust approach to the generation of high-quality random numbers

Zahra Bisadi, Giorgio Fontana, Enrico Moser, Georg Pucker, Lorenzo Pavesi

Published Oct 24, 2016• 1 citation

Abstract

A random number generation approach comprising a silicon nanocrystals LED (Si-NCs LED), silicon single photon avalanche photodiode (Si SPAD) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is introduced. The Si-NCs LED is the source of entropy with photon emission in the visible range detectable by silicon detectors allowing the fabrication of an all-silicon-based device. The proposed quantum random number generator (QRNG) is robust against variations of the internal and external parameters such as aging of the components, changing temperature, the ambient interferences and the silicon detector artifacts. The raw data show high quality of randomness and passed all the statistical tests in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests suite without the application of a post-processing algorithm. The efficiency of random number generation is 4-bits per detected photon.

DOI: 10.1117/12.2242000

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