Generation of 8 Gb/s physical random numbers based on spontaneous chaotic oscillation of GaAs/Al0.45Ga0.55As superlattices

Abstract

<sec>Secret key is required in secure communications, and random numbers are generally used as keys to encrypt the original information. So it is crucial for cryptography and secure communication to generate the physical random number, which is completely safer than pseudo random number. However, Existing physical random number generator systems are difficult to satisfy the requirements of high-speed communication due to their complexity, large size, and limited equipment bandwidth. The GaAs/Al_0.45Ga_0.55 superlattices is based on a structure formed by the alternating growth of two semiconductor materials, and has a good low-dimensional structure for studying the nonlinear behavior of electrons. Recent studies have shown that the GaAs/Al_0.45Ga_0.55 superlattices under the DC voltage could appear chaos current oscillation states in some certain voltage ranges.</sec><sec>An all-solid-state real-time high-speed physical true random number generator based on superlattices is presented. The superlattices, excited by appropriate DC bias voltage, could generate a high-frequency chaotic oscillation signal as a source of physical entropy. A multi-bit analog-to-digital converter with 2 GHz sampling frequency is used for quantization to generate 12-bit binary random bits. Then, the field programmable gate array extracts the lowest 4 bits as valid bits and inverts bits to improve its randomness, and finally a true random number with a real-time rate of 8 Gbit/s is obtained. To obtained a superlattices signal with a higher degree of chaos, the Lyapunov exponent was used to assist in selecting a more suitable DC bias. The random number generated by the superlattices, owning excellent statistical characteristics, could pass the test of the random number industry standard (NIST SP 800-22), which is expected to be miniaturized and integrated on high-speed communication equipment.</sec>