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Avalanche Noise Generator Notes

posted by janrinok on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:10AM   
from the schschschschschschschsch dept.

canopic jug writes:

Famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has posted an overview of his notes on designing an open source entropy generator. His summary links to the full notes which include schematics, measurement results, as well as other key details.

The final optimized design takes <1cm² area and draws 520uA at 3.3V when active and 12uA in standby (mostly 1.8V LDO leakage for the output stage, included in the measurement but normally provided by the system), and it passes preliminary functional tests from 2.8-4.4V and 0-80C. The output levels target a 0-1V swing, meant to be sampled using an on-chip ADC from a companion MCU, but one could add a comparator and turn it into a digital-compatible bitstream I suppose. I opted to use an actual diode instead of a NPN B-E junction, because the noise quality is empirically better and anecdotes on the Internet claim the NPN B-E junctions fail over time when operated as noise sources. I'll probably go through another iteration of tweaking before final integration, but afaik this is the smallest, lowest power open-source avalanche noise generator to date (slightly smaller than this one [PDF]).

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Original Submission

• It is of interest to some of us. It is of interest to some of us. (Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:22PM (2 children)

  by janrinok (52) on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:22PM (#832577) Journal

  this project is probably better posted to hackaday,

  This project could have been posted to hackaday but seeing that we do, from time to time, publish stories from hackaday the topic is also perfectly at home here also. There are so many uses for good quality randomly generated values in STEM that a reasonable proportion of our community will be interested in this story. That may or may not equate to lots of comments, however if we relied entirely on comment count then this site would consist only stories where the US members of our community throw political mud at each other. ...And that is most certainly not what this site is about.

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  Starting Score:	1		point
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  Insightful=1, Touché=1, Total=2
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• Re:It is of interest to some of us. (Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:56PM

  by RS3 (6367) on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:56PM (#832589)

  This is awesome. Now we can throw electrified mud! That'll leave a mark for sure!

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• Re:It is of interest to some of us. (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:20PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:20PM (#832738)

  If Hillary had a better random number generator, her emails would still be secure.

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