A 1.04 µW Truly Random Number Generator for Gen2 RFID tag

Abstract

This paper proposes a low power, low voltage Truly Random Number Generator (TRNG) for EPC Gen2 RFID tag. According to the special requirements of Gen2 tag, design considerations and tradeoffs among chip area, power consumption and randomicity are presented. The proposed TRNG is composed of an analog random seed generator which uses the oscillator sampling mechanism, and Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR) for post digital processing. Realized in SMIC 0.18 μm standard CMOS process, the TRNG generates 16-bit random series at a speed of 40 kb/s, and their randomicity performance is verified by the FIPS 140-2 standard for security. Power consumption of the TRNG is only 1.04 μW with a minimum supply voltage of 0.8 V, and its total chip area is 0.05 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .