High performance physical random number generator

Abstract

A field programmable gate array (FPGA) -based implementation of a physical random number generator (PRNG) is presented. The PRNG uses an alternating step generator construction to decorrelate an oscillator-phase-noise-based physical random source. The resulting design can be implemented completely in digital technology, requires no external components, is very small in area, achieves very high throughput and has good statistical properties. The PRNG was implemented on an FPGA device and tested using the NIST, Diehard and TestU01 random number test suites.