Jailbreak Imagers: Transforming a Single-Photon Image Sensor into a True Random Number Generator.
Samuel Burri, Damien Stucki, Yuki Maruyama, Claudio E. Bruschini, Edoardo Charbon, Francesco Regazzoni · Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 2024
In this paper we present a large array of SPADs and we discuss its suitability for applications different than imaging, exploring in particular how to transform it into a high speed True Random Number Generator (TRNG). The proposed matrix comprises 512x128 independent cells that convert photons into a raw bit-stream, which, as ensured by the properties of quantum physics, is characterized by a very high level of randomness. The sequences are read out in a 128-bit parallel bus, concatenated, and pipelined onto a de-biasing filter. Our results, achieved by coupling two matrices, show that our architecture can reach up to 5 Gbit/s while consuming 25pJ/bit, to our knowledge the lowest in a TRNG to date.