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IEEE Photonics Technology Letters

16.8 Tb/s True Random Number Generator Based on Amplified Spontaneous Emission

Guangshuo Cao, Liuming Zhang, Xinran Huang, Weisheng Hu, Xuelin Yang

Published Jun 11, 2021• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report a 16.8 Tb/s true random number generator (TRNG) based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), which is sliced into 42 parallel channels by an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG). The true randomness of ASE is enhanced and guaranteed by a novel extraction approach utilizing two orthogonal polarized components of ASE. Consequently, the random number generation rate (RNGR) can be significantly increased via higher sampling rate. The experimental results show that, the single-channel RNGR of 400 Gb/s is achieved, while the overall RNGR is 16.8 Tb/s for the full ASE spectrum. The proposed TRNG is of great significance in the field of secret key distribution and confidential communication.

DOI
10.1109/lpt.2021.3088156

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We report a 16.8 Tb/s true random number generator (TRNG) based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), which is sliced into 42 parallel channels by an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG). The true randomness of ASE is enhanced and guaranteed by a novel extraction approach utilizing two orthogonal polarized components of ASE. Consequently, the random number generation rate (RNGR) can be significantly increased via higher sampling rate. The experimental results show that, the single-channel RNGR of 400 Gb/s is achieved, while the overall RNGR is 16.8 Tb/s for the full ASE spectrum. The proposed TRNG is of great significance in the field of secret key distribution and confidential communication.
Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise with inherent quantum nature is promising for true random number generator (TRNG) and secure key generation and distribution (SKGD). A high-speed TRNG and a physical-layer SKGD scheme are proposed and demonstrated using the polarization dynamics of an ASE source. The ASE-based randomness is enhanced in TRNG using digital signal processing on the two orthogonal polarization modes, while the fluctuation of the state of polarization (SOP) in ASE is applied as the random source in SKGD. A 16.8 Tb/s TRNG is successfully demonstrated with spectrum slicing of ASE. An error-free SKGD with a key generation rate (KGR) of 10.1 Gb/s is demonstrated over a 10-km standard single-mode fiber channel.
High-speed physical-layer secure key generation and distribution (SKGD) schemes via channel reciprocity are achieved using external electro-optical modulation or random source distribution via additional fiber links. Here, we propose and demonstrate an SKGD scheme using the fluctuation of polarization states from an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source, without any external electro-optical modulation or additional fiber link. Experimentally, an error-free key generation rate (KGR) of 10.1 Gb/s is achieved over a 10-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), with true randomness originating from ASE. Moreover, the single fiber channel can be shared for SKGD as well as data transmission, allowing the integration of the proposed SKGD with the deployed fiber infrastructure.
We present a photonic approach for fast quantum random number generation based on optically sampled amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). This approach utilizes a terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer to sample the ASE and then digitize the sampled optical pulses into random bits using a multi-bit parallel comparator. A proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates that 40 Gb/s random bits with verified randomness can be obtained using our method. The current generation rate is mainly limited by the bandwidth of the available ASE source.
The most common optical amplified spontaneous emission sources can become the ultimate tools for the generation of ultra-broadband truly random bit sequences (TRBS). By using a straightforward configuration we experimentally prove that the amplified spontaneous emission noise of an optical amplifier-either an Er+3-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) or an InGaAs semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-is an efficient source for TRBS generation. A bit rate up to 560 Gb/s has been recorded, seeded by the direct detection of the unfiltered spontaneous-spontaneous (sp-sp) optical intensity beat noise on a broadband photoreceiver. The generation rate is practically limited only by the detection bandwidth, the electronic digitization process and the post-processing circuitry. The proposed mechanism passes the existing benchmarks of randomness.
Quantum random number generators (QRNG) based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) are known to achieve multi-gigabit-per-second rates through high-speed sampling of intensity and phase fluctuations. Two popular implementations of these QRNGs are based on balanced detection of ASEASE and ASE-Laser beating. The high QRNG rates reported so far however come at the price of increased system complexity, making it a clear deterrent for widespread use. In this paper, we perform a direct one-to-one comparison study between ASEASE and ASE-Laser-based QRNGs using detailed theoretical modeling and supporting experiments, with the goal of achieving 1 Gbps QRNG using simple, low-bandwidth photodetectors and low sampling rate digitizers. We develop, for the first time to the best of out knowledge, closed-form analytical expressions to describe the signal variance as a function of realistic, nonideal fiber-optic optical components, the signal correlations as a function of digitizer sampling rate, and minimum entropy as a function of signal variance. We observe a trade-off between the correlations in the detected signals and the sampling rate used, thereby obtaining an optimum sampling rate and hence the digitizer specification for extracting the best randomness. We also observe the standard deviation in the signal distribution is higher for ASE-Laser QRNG in comparison to the ASE-ASE implementation. Using off-the-shelf telecom fiber components, balanced detectors with bandwidth as low as 100 MHz, and an 8-bit digitizer operating at a sampling rate of 100 Megasamplesper-second (MSPS), we achieve QRNG rates of 546.03 Mbps and 507.94 Mbps for the ASE-ASE and ASE-Laser beating implementations respectively. The ASE-ASE QRNG rates are subsequently doubled to more than 1 Gbps using polarization multiplexing and bit-interleaving.
We report two Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) schemes based on Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) to address the problems of previous ASE based QRNGs – (1) costlier and commercially difficult-to-get components, (2) higher electrical noise in the faster detectors. Our ASE-ASE-beating based QRNG, built using commercially available components, clocks in 7.437Gbps random number generation rate. Our second QRNG scheme based on the beating of LASER and ASE of similar power generates random bits at a speed of 7.80Gbps. The minimum entropy values for these schemes are 5.21 and 5.4990 respectively for an 8-bit ADC. The second scheme reports higher entropy because its random numbers has a higher variance than first one. We use the Toeplitz extractor on the raw bits to generate unbiased random numbers and verify them with the help of industry-standard statistical tests.