A High Throughput No-Stall Golomb-Rice Hardware Decoder

Integer compression techniques can generally be classified as bit-wise and byte-wise approaches. Though at the cost of a larger processing time, bit-wise techniques typically result in a better compression ratio. The Golomb-Rice (GR) method is a bit-wise lossless technique applied to the compression of images, audio files and lists of inverted indices. However, since GR is a serial algorithm, decompression is regarded as a very slow process; to the best of our knowledge, all existing software and hardware native (non-modified) GR decoding engines operate bit-serially on the encoded stream. In this paper, we present (1) the first no-stall hardware architecture, capable of decompressing streams of integers compressed using the GR method, at a rate of several bytes (multiple integers) per hardware cycle; (2) a novel GR decoder based on the latter architecture is further detailed, operating at a peak rate of one integer per cycle. A thorough design space exploration study on the resulting resource utilization and throughput of the aforementioned approaches is presented. Furthermore, a performance study is provided, comparing software approaches to implementations of the novel hardware decoders. While occupying 10% of a Xilinx V6LX240T FPGA, the no-stall architecture core achieves a sustained throughput of over 7 Gbps.