Procedure Based Program Compression

Cost and power consumption are two of the most important design factors for many embedded systems, particularly consumer devices. Products such as Personal Digital Assistants, pagers with integrated data services, and smart phones have fixed performance requirements but unlimited appetites for reduced cost and increased battery life. Program compression is one technique that can be used to attack both of these problems. Compressed programs require less memory, thus reducing the cost of both direct materials and manufacturing. Furthermore, by relying on compressed memory, the total number of memory references is reduced. This reduction saves power by lowering the traffic on high capacitance buses. This paper will discuss a new approach to implementing transparent program compression that requires little or no hardware support. Procedures are compressed individually, and a directory structure is used to bind them together at runtime. Decompressed procedures are explicitly cached in ordi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Darko Kirovski, Johnson Kin, William H. Mangione-Smith
• Keywords: Average Memory Reduction, Hardware, MICRO 1997, Program Compression, Reduction Saves Power