Chaos in Fully Digital Circuits: A Novel Approach to the Design of Entropy Sources

We propose a novel class of Digital Nonlinear Oscillators (DNOs) supporting complex dynamics, including chaos, suitable for the definition of high-performance and low-complexity entropy sources in digital programmable devices. We derive our solution from the analysis of simplified models, proposing a low-complexity ‘fully digital’ chaotic entropy source consuming few look-up tables in a Xilinx FPGA. The validity of the proposal has been verified with experiments.