Towards low-cost monolithic QRNGs

The present paper shows possible ways to design monolithic Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs) in a standard CMOS technology. While all commercial QRNGs based on SPAD technology use an external light as main source of entropy, in the present implementation silicon-based photon sources are used. This approach allows the integration of monolithic QRNGs paving the way towards miniaturized and low-cost devices. Moreover, being the QRNG realized in a standard CMOS technology, in perspective, it can potentially be embedded in secure microprocessor. In the paper we show that the proposed approach is compact, produces a minimum event rate of about 1kHz, possibly extended in case of the implementation of multi-QRNGs working in parallel.