FCCM2008: Titan-R: A Multi-Gigabit Recon gurable Combined Compression/Decompression Unit

Data compression techniques can alleviate bandwidth problems in even multigigabit networks and are especially useful when combined with encryption. This paper demonstrates a reconfigurable hardware compressor/ decompressor core, the Titan-R, which can compress/decompress data streams at 8.5 Gb/sec making it the fastest reconfigurable such device ever proposed; the presented full-duplex implementation allows for fully symmetric compression and decompression rates at 8.5 Gbps each. Its compression algorithm is a variation of the most widely used and efficient such scheme, the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) algorithm that uses part of the previous input stream as the dictionary. In order to support this high network throughput the Titan-R utilizes a very fine-grained pipeline and takes advantages of the high-bandwidth provided by the distributed on-chip RAMs of state-of-the-art FPGAs.