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Are there hardware solutions to compress data? Specifically, I am looking for a low power IC that implements something like zip compression, to take load off the microcontroller, as it often is very resource constrained. For example, doing online data compression to send over a low bitrate communication link.

I was able to find a few hardware implementations but as PCIe cards (mentioned in this Wikipedia page). I was also able to find cryptography ICs, but no general purpose data compression ICs.

freejuices
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    What is "general purpose data compression"? Yes, there's accelerator IP cores for things like Lempel-Civ-Welch, as that happens to be part of some video codecs. But this sounds like something that CPUs in modern x86 servers are pretty good at, given the memory bandwidth limits you'll hit. So, not quite sure whether something overly useful for your specific use case exists – could you edit your question to include information on your use case? This is all a bit too abstract to yield much better answers than "yes.". – Marcus Müller Jan 03 '19 at 17:26
  • You can implement any (?) digital data compression algorithm in digital dedicated hardware such as FPGA or ASICs. But it will lack some of the flexibilities associated with the general purpose CPU / software solutions. Search internet for hardware zip codecs. – Fat32 Jan 04 '19 at 22:37
  • I edited the question to add a few application details. At this point I'm thinking that adding a second microcontroller might be more reasonable – freejuices Jan 07 '19 at 15:49

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