Profile-Driven Selective Code Compression

• Published in: Design, Automation, and Test in Europe: Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe - Volume 1; 03-07 Mar. 2003 p. 10462
• Main Authors: Xie, Yuan, Wolf, Wayne, Lekatsas, Haris
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 03.03.2003
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Computer systems organization > Embedded and cyber-physical systems; Computer systems organization > Real-time systems; Hardware > Integrated circuits > Semiconductor memory; Information systems > Data management systems > Data structures > Data layout > Data compression
• ISBN: 0769518702; 9780769518701
• ISSN: 1530-1591
• DOI: 10.5555/789083.1022770

In the embedded system design, memory is one of the most restricted resources. Code compression has been proposed as a solution to reduce the code size of applications for embedded systems. Data compression techniques are used to compress programs to reduce memory size. Most previous work compresses all instructions found in an executable, without taking into account the program execution profile. In this paper, a profile-driven code compression design methodology is proposed. Program profiling information can be used to help code compression to selectively compress non-critical instructions, such that the system performance degradation due to the decompression penalty is reduced.