A fully integrated chaotic system for the generation of truly random numbers

This work proposes a random numbers generator for application in the field of secure communications. In order to get truly unpredictable sequences a chaotic system is used. Indeed, due to their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, chaotic systems lend themselves to be exploited for generation of random numbers. This work explores this possibility: particularly an efficient architecture, based on a pipeline analog-to-digital converter, has been singled out, in order to realize a simple circuit arrangement of the number generator. According to simulation results, the circuit provides sequences of 8-b numbers that are uniformly distributed and statistically independent, at a rate of 20 Ms/s. The circuit is realized in 0.8-/spl mu/m CMOS technology, and dissipates 50 mW.