Effects of program compression

The size of the program code has become a critical design constraint in embedded systems, especially in handheld, battery operated devices. Large program codes require large memories, which increase the size and cost of the chip. In addition, the power consumption is increased due to higher memory I/O bandwidth. Program compression is one of the most often used methods to reduce the size of the program code. In this paper, two compression approaches, dictionary-based compression and instruction template-based compression, were evaluated on a customizable processor architecture with parallel resources. The effects on area and power consumption were measured. Dictionary-based compression reduced the area at best by 77% and power consumption by 73%. Instruction template-based compression resulted in increase in both area and power consumption and hence turned out to be impractical.