Measuring the Jitter of Ring Oscillators by means of Information Theory Quantifiers

MAXIMILIANO ANTONELLI; LUCIANA DE MICCO; HILDA A. LARRONDO

COMMUNICATIONS IN NONLINEAR SCIENCE AND NUMERICAL SIMULATION

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2017 vol. 43 p. 139 - 150

1007-5704

Ring oscillators (RO´s) are elementary blocks widely used indigital design.Jitter is unavoidable in ROs, its presence is an undesired behavior inmany applications, as clock generators. On the contrary, jitter may beused as the noise source in RO-based pseudo-random numbers generators(PRNG). Consequently, jitter measure is a relevant issue to characterizea RO, and it is the subject of this paper. The main contribution is theuse of Information Theory Quantifiers (ITQ) as measures of ROs jitter. Itis shown that among several ITQ evaluated, two of them emerge as goodmeasures because they are independent of parameters used for theirstatistical determination. They turned outto be robust and may be implemented experimentally. We encountered that adual entropy plane allows a visual comparison of results.