[gsliepen]

I am not surprised, as most things that generate light are generating photons using quantum effects, and thus are true random. Furthermore, CCD and CMOS detectors themselves have a quantum efficiency less than 100%, meaning they only detect a fraction of the incoming photons at random. So, a regular light bulb in front of a webcam is already a quite high-bandwidth source of true random numbers.

So, there is nothing revolutionary going on there, this paper is more about how to build a system with micro-LEDs and a photodetector and how to remove any inherent biases in that system, with the obvious benefit of being able to make something very compact.

[fnordpiglet]

That’s not actually what the paper is about and it does discuss that LEDs did random number generation isn’t new. It’s more about using GaN microLEDs to produce high volume real time random numbers at a very low component, cost, and power. The key emphasis in the paper is on the high rates of number creation - 9Gb/s.