Titan-R

Abstract

Data compression techniques can alleviate bandwidth problems in even multigigabit networks and are especially useful when combined with encryption. This article 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 advantage of the high bandwidth provided by the distributed on-chip RAMs of state-of-the-art FPGAs.