Parameterized decompression hardware for a program memory compression system

Abstract

Rapidly evolving markets and application demands of digital consumer electronics are pushing more functionality to software, increasing also requirements for memory capacity of systems. There have been efforts to reduce the need for memories by for example compressing the program code and thus also program memory footprint. We have previously introduced an effective code compression scheme, and in this paper, we present parameterized and flexible decompression hardware for decoding the compressed code. On-chip hardware and decoding tables, that are used to store compressed code sequences, bring only about 3% reduction to the compression ratio, which is 53% at best.