@conference {18470,
	title = {Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) for quantum random number generators and beyond},
	booktitle = {19th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) 2014},
	year = {2014},
	month = {01/2014},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	organization = {IEEE},
	address = {Singapore},
	abstract = {Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) are solid-state photo-detectors capable of detecting single photons by exploiting the avalanche effect that occurs in the breakdown of a p-n junction biased above breakdown voltage. By this effect, a SPAD translates an incoming photon to a macroscopic current pulse. These devices are currently used for building medical devices characterized by a very high time resolution. An appealing application of SPAD is to use them as a basic block for building the entropy source of true random number generators. In this paper we focus on such application, and we explore the design challenges behind the realization of a quantum random number generator based on a massively parallel array of SPADs. The matrix under investigation comprises 512{\texttimes}128 independent cells that convert photons onto 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. Subsequently, we fabricated the proposed chip using a standard CMOS process. Our results, achieved on the manufactured device and coupling two matrices, show that our architecture can reach up to 5 Gbit/s while consuming 25pJ/bit, thus demonstrating scalability and performance for any random number generators based on SPADs},
	keywords = {quantum physics, random number generators, SPAD},
	isbn = {978-1-4799-2816-3},
	url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6736726},
	author = {Regazzoni, Francesco and Burri, Samuel and Stucki, Damien and Maruyama, Yuki and Bruschini, Claudio and Charbon, Edoardo}
}
