Summary

Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications

2012

Session Number:A2L-D

Session:

Number:130

All-optical Random Number Generator

Pu Li,  Jian-Zhong Zhang,  Yun-Cai Wang,  

pp.130-133

Publication Date:

Online ISSN:2188-5079

DOI:10.15248/proc.1.130

PDF download (1.3MB)

Chaotic laser has become a promising candidate for Gb/s true random number generator (TRNG) in recent years because of its high bandwidth. Most TRNGs based on chaotic laser process signals in the electronic domain, and thus their rates will be limited by ‘electronic bottleneck’. In this paper, we review our recent works on all-optical TRNGs. All-optical TRNGs are not only based on the entropy source of chaotic laser, but also do all signal processing in the optical domain. Especially, we propose and theoretically demonstrate a novel all-optical method which generating all-optical random numbers from discrete chaos produced by a mode-locked laser. In this method, discrete chaotic pulses are directly quantized into random number sequences via an all-optical flip-flop, unlike previous RNGs which require sampling procedure and external triggered clocks before quantization. Moreover, free from post-processing, the obtained random number sequence has a high-quality randomness verified by industry-standard statistical tests. Therefore, our approach can bypass the possible aliasing problem caused by sampling procedure and greatly reduce hardware complexity.

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