LZ4 compression algorithm on FPGA

This paper describes analysis and implementation of a LZ4 compression algorithm. LZ4 is derived from a standard LZ77 compression algorithm and is focused on the compression and decompression speed. The LZ4 lossless compression algorithm was analyzed regarding its suitability for hardware implementation. The first step of this research is based on software implementation of LZ4 with regard to the future hardware implementation. As a second step, a simple hardware implementation of LZ4 is evaluated for bottlenecks in the original LZ4 code. Xilinx Virtex-6 and 7-Series FPGAs are used to obtain experimental results. These results are compared to the industry competitor.