Class-Based Decompressor Design for Compressed Instruction Memory in Embedded Processors

We introduce a new PLA-based decoder architecture for random-access runtime decompression of compressed instruction memory in embedded systems. The compression method employs class-based coding. The symbol codebook used for decompression is fully programmable; thus, good compression may be achieved by adapting the codebook to the symbol frequency statistics of the target binary program. We show that this new class-based decoder architecture can be extended to provide high throughput decompression.