The development of the mobile industry brings about the demand for high-performance embedded systems in order to meet the requirement of user-centered application. Because of the limitation of memory resource, employing compressed data is efficient for an embedded system. However, the workload for data decompression causes an extreme bottleneck to the embedded processor. One of the ways to alleviate the bottleneck is to integrate a hardware accelerator along with the processor, constructing a system-on-chip (SoC) for the embedded system. In this paper, we propose a lossless decompression accelerator for an embedded processor, which supports LZ77 decompression and static Huffman decoding for an inflate algorithm. The accelerator is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to verify the functional suitability and fabricated in a Samsung 65 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. The performance of the accelerator is evaluated by the Canterbury corpus benchmark and achieved throughput up to 20.7 MB/s at 50 MHz system clock frequency.
Keywords: embedded processor; graphical user interface; hardware accelerator; inflate algorithm; lossless compression; system-on-chip.