1.7 GBit/s RNG by laser feedback

[coderman]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Europus <europus at gmail.com> wrote:
>...
> On another board, this is being called a PRNG. One point that
> is raised, if it was truly an RNG then it wouldn't be necessary
> to mix the outputs from two laser assemblies.

i was focused on the whitened vs. raw entropy in the previous post and
overlooked the point you were getting at.

it is good practice to use more than one hardware entropy source in a
system.  (on VIA's boards, only the first gen C5XL cores had a single
source, after that two are always present).

if one fails you have a backup and combined they can double
throughput.  if your requirements necessitate a high throughput
hardware (true) entropy source you can't fall back on software and
host entropy scavenging - it's just too slow. so you get two or more
sources and expect at least one to be functional for the lifetime of
the system.

there doesn't seem to be any additional technical detail about this
setup so perhaps we'll find out more later...

best regards,