A new code compression algorithm and its decompressor in FPGA-based hardware

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method of code compression for embedded systems called by us as CC-MLD (Compressed Code using Huffman-Based Multi-Level Dictionary). This method applies two compression techniques and it uses the Huffman code compression algorithm. A single dictionary is divided into two levels and it is shared by both techniques. We performed simulations using applications from MiBench and we have used four embedded processors (ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC). Our method reduces code size up to 30.6% (including all extra costs for these four platforms). We have implemented the decompressor using VHDL and FPGA and we obtained only one clock from decompression process.