Design of a High-Throughput Match Search Unit for Lossless Compression Algorithms

This paper presents an attempt to combine recent research in fields of hardware-and software-based high-throughput universal lossless compression algorithms and their implementations, resulting into a case study focusing on one of the most critical parts of compression algorithms - a Match Search Unit (MSU) and its parallelization. The presented FPGA design combines ideas of the LZ4 algorithm (which is derived from the most common LZ77) with the state of the art hardware architectures for lossless compression also based on LZ77. This approach might lead to a smaller, better organized or more efficient "building block" for modern implementations of hardware driven lossless compression algorithms. The presented design focuses on optimization of the main problem of the LZ77 family, namely the construction of and searching in a compression dictionary. Particularly, we combine a Live Value Table (LVT) with multi-ported memory in order to improve the bandwidth of the dictionary and the Fibonacci hashing principle originating from LZ4 algorithm to decrease latency of the MSU and to achieve overall higher throughput rate. For the design synthesis an FPGA of the Xilinx Virtex-7 family was used.