TROT: A Three-Edge Ring Oscillator Based True Random Number Generator With Time-to-Digital Conversion

This paper introduces a new true random number generator (TRNG) based on a three-edge ring oscillator. Our design uses a new technique with a time-to-digital converter to effectively acquire jitter accumulated independently by each edge. As a part of the security evaluation, we present the stochastic model of the TRNG’s digital noise source and estimate a lower bound of the min-entropy per random bit. Starting from the obtained entropy bound, we propose a procedure for selecting and implementing an area-efficient and throughput-optimal post-processing function based on the best known linear codes that will increase the output min-entropy rate to more than 0.999. The proposed TRNG exquisitely balances low design effort and resource consumption with high throughput and a high min-entropy rate, making it more suitable for randomness-demanding and resource-constrained platforms than the state-of-the-art. The complete implementation of the TRNG digital noise source and the post-processing occupies 33 slices and achieves a throughput of 12.5 Mbps on Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGAs. The min-entropy of the generated random bits is assessed by NIST SP 800-90B entropy estimators, and the tested sequences pass the AIS-31 test suit.