Fully pipelined hardware engine design for fast and efficient inline lossless data compression

摘要

A hardware compression system is provided. The system includes a hardware pipeline having a plurality of stages arranged to receive pre-compression data into a data buffer, populate a first hash table and a second hash table, supply the pre-compression data to a hash lookup module to access the first hash table and the second hash table in parallel, supply a string match module with results from the hash lookup module so that the string match module compares pre-compression data from multiple locations in the data buffer in parallel, supply a match merge module with results from the string match module so that the match merge module generates literals and metadata for compression data, and supply an output encoding module with results from the match merge module so that the output encoding module encodes the compression data.