Noise generator by free FPGA technology

Abstract

The IceStorm project by Clifford Wolf, which involved reverse engineering of an FPGA from Lattice, has sparked interest in developing open-source software and hardware within free FPGA communities. As a contribution to these communities, this paper presents the development of a block generator of random sequences with Gaussian distribution in the Icestudio environment. This block was used in the design and implementation of a Gaussian White Noise generator on the open-source FPGA of the Alhambra II board. Experimental tests demonstrated the similarity of the obtained distribution with the results from the simulation in Matlab and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the generated noise signal, verifying its limited bandwidth spectrum.