• Advanced Photonics
  • Vol. 4, Issue 3, 035001 (2022)
Ya Guo1、2、3、†, Qiang Cai1, Pu Li1、2、*, Ruonan Zhang3, Bingjie Xu4, K. Alan Shore5, and Yuncai Wang2
Author Affiliations
  • 1Taiyuan University of Technology, Key Laboratory of Advanced Transducers and Intelligent Control Systems, Ministry of Education, Taiyuan, China
  • 2Guangdong University of Technology, School of Information Engineering, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Photonics Information Technology, Guangzhou, China
  • 3Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Electronics and Information, Xi’an, China
  • 4Institute of Southwestern Communication, Science and Technology on Communication Laboratory, Chengdu, China
  • 5Bangor University, School of Electronic Engineering, Wales, United Kingdom
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    DOI: 10.1117/1.AP.4.3.035001 Cite this Article Set citation alerts
    Ya Guo, Qiang Cai, Pu Li, Ruonan Zhang, Bingjie Xu, K. Alan Shore, Yuncai Wang. Ultrafast and real-time physical random bit extraction with all-optical quantization[J]. Advanced Photonics, 2022, 4(3): 035001 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    Optical chaos generated by perturbing semiconductor lasers has been viewed, over recent decades, as an excellent entropy source for fast physical random bit generation (RBG) owing to its high bandwidth and large random fluctuations. However, most optical-chaos-based random bit generators perform their quantization process in the electrical domain using electrical analog-to-digital converters, so their real-time rates in a single channel are severely limited at the level of Gb/s due to the electronic bottleneck. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an all-optical method for RBG where chaotic pulses are quantized into a physical random bit stream in the all-optical domain by means of a length of highly nonlinear fiber. In our proof-of-concept experiment, a 10-Gb/s random bit stream is successfully generated on-line using our method. Note that the single-channel real-time rate is limited only by the chaos bandwidth. Considering that the Kerr nonlinearity of silica fiber with an ultrafast response of few femtoseconds is exploited for composing the key part of quantizing laser chaos, this scheme thus may operate potentially at much higher real-time rates than 100 Gb/s provided that a chaotic entropy source of sufficient bandwidth is available.
    Ya Guo, Qiang Cai, Pu Li, Ruonan Zhang, Bingjie Xu, K. Alan Shore, Yuncai Wang. Ultrafast and real-time physical random bit extraction with all-optical quantization[J]. Advanced Photonics, 2022, 4(3): 035001
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