Fast hardware random number generator for the Tausworthe sequence

Abstract

Many simulation programs require m-dimensional uniformly distributed random numbers. A linear recurrence modulo two generator, based on N-bits and producing L-bit numbers (L ≤ N), according to Tausworthe theory, may yield a sequence of m-tuples uniformly distributed in m e (N/L) dimensions. When using software computing algorithms on a binary computer, for large N (e.g. N e 159), the generation speed is for many purposes too slow. To overcome this disadvantage we present a new concept of a hardware random number generator, to give the Tausworthe sequence with high generation speed independent of the number of bits per word N. For a 32-bit data word computer we have performed statistical tests on three generators, two of them gave good results.