ADCs, Chaos and TRNGs: a Generalized View Exploiting Markov Chain Lumpability Properties

We show that any TRNG architecture based on the cascade of a noise source, an ADC, and a digital postprocessor can be simplified getting rid of the explicit noise source, by modifying the ADC to simultaneously act as both an entropy source and a data acquisition block. Though gains may vary, this is practicable with any ADC type and can be seen as the generalization of a recent proposal where a TRNG was obtained out of the
1 + ½
bit stages of a pipeline converter.