Code compression by register operand dependency

This paper proposes a dictionary-based code compression technique that maps the source register operands to the nearest occurrence of a destination register in the predecessor instructions. The key idea is that most destination registers have great potential to be used as source registers in the following instructions. The dependent registers can be removed from the dictionary if this information can be specified otherwise. As a result, the compression ratio benefits from the decreased dictionary size. A set of programs has been compressed using this feature. The compression results show that the average compression ratio is reduced to 38.6% on average for MediaBench benchmarks compiled for MIPS R2000 processor.