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

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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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 21 2019, @03:13AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 21 2019, @03:13AM (#832836) Journal

    do you believe that randomness can be 'improved' algorithmically, be it as that comment suggested, by randomly selecting random generators, or any other means? iow, is there a 'better than ordinary randomness?'

    Yes, since the generator isn't optimal. But there is a hard upper limit to how much entropy can be generated per unit time and it would probably be proportional to the heat generated by the part that's generating the randomness (in the circuit [betrusted.io] pf the story the TPS61158 chip).