An Efcient Code Compression Technique using Application-Aware Bitmask and Dictionary Selection Methods

Memory plays a crucial role in designing embedded systems. A larger memory can accommodate more and large applica-tions but increases cost, area, as well as energy requirements. Code compression techniques address this problem by reducing the size of the applications. While early work on bitmask-based compression has proposed several promising ideas, many chal-lenges remain in applying them to embedded system design. This paper makes two important contributions to address these challenges by developing application-specic bitmask selection and bitmask-aware dictionary selection techniques. We applied these techniques for code compression of TI and MediaBench applications to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.