Data compression technology in ASIC cores

IBM has made its data compression technology available to the industry through the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) Blue Logic core program. The papers in this journal describe four of IBM's data compression cores which are in that core library: ALDC (adaptive lossless data compression), JBIG-ABIC (Joint Bi-level Image Group-Adaptive Bi-level Image Compression), MPEG-2 (Moving Picture Experts Group-2), and 401DEC (decompression for the IBM PowerPC 401™ embedded processor). This paper is organized into three main sections: a description of the data types covered by the technology; a presentation of data compression availability through the core library elements; and a brief overview of the papers which follow.