This is an aside, but I'm curious why the noise in the reverse voltage of a Zener is preferable to just the Gaussian noise generated by a resistor. There must be a practical reason.
The reverse breakdown voltage is all over the place due to avalanche effects. You might get as much as 50 mV of pure noise out of a single Zener junction if you're lucky and it won't take much amplification at all (which might negatively affect your randomness) to get to a level that you can quantize easily. You could even do it un-amplified with the right biasing.
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This is an aside, but I'm curious why the noise in the reverse voltage of a Zener is preferable to just the Gaussian noise generated by a resistor. There must be a practical reason.
The reverse breakdown voltage is all over the place due to avalanche effects. You might get as much as 50 mV of pure noise out of a single Zener junction if you're lucky and it won't take much amplification at all (which might negatively affect your randomness) to get to a level that you can quantize easily. You could even do it un-amplified with the right biasing.
Zeners are just noisier.