2025/10/23 by Criss, Troy, Valli, Ahmed Sidi El, Li, Naomi +2
#Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.20735
We demonstrate a method to generate application-ready truly random bits from a magnetic tunnel junction driven by a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). We implement a real-time feedback loop that stabilizes the switching probability near 50% and apply an XOR operation, both on the FPGA, to suppress short-term correlations, together mitigating long-term drift and bias in the bitstream. This combined approach enables NIST-compliant random bit generation at 5~Mb/s without post-processing, providing a practical hardware solution for fast and reliable true random number generation. Beyond cryptographic applications, these capabilities open opportunities for stochastic hardware accelerators, probabilistic computing, and large-scale modeling where real-time access to unbiased randomness is essential.