A Novel Algorithm to Improve the Performance of the Decoder Without Affecting the Compression Ratio to Increase the Instruction Match Rates

Abstract

A larger memory can accommodate more and large applications but increases cost, area, as well as energy requirements. Code-compression techniques address this issue by reducing the code size of application programs. It is a major challenge to develop an efficient code-compression technique that can generate substantial reduction in code size without affecting the overall system performance. In this paper, various steps in the code compression process were combined into a new algorithm to improve the compression performance (including the CR) with a smaller hardware overhead. Based on the Bitmask code compression (BCC) algorithm, a small separated dictionary is proposed to restrict the codeword length of high-frequency instructions, and a novel dictionary selection algorithm is proposed to achieve more satisfactory instruction selection, which in turn may reduce the average CR. Furthermore, the fully separated dictionary architecture is proposed to improve the performance of the dictionary-based decompression engine.