Abstract
Processors have brought flexibility and programmability to the computational world. The emerging DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) are becoming fast in order to run the state of the art applications like Audio, Imaging, Video and Vocoders. Though the emerging DSPs have (except for video) sufficient MIPS (Million Instructions per Second) for running above-mentioned applications/standards, it is imperative that the applications consume less MIPS and Memory to provide cost-effective solutions to the end users. Though the DSP architectures are optimized for Signal Processing applications, they are not so in case of search algorithms. But, Huffman encoding/decoding, which uses search algorithms, has become one of the essential components of the compression standards. Hence it is essential that the Huffman Encoder/Decoder should be efficiently implemented on the DSP chosen. The complexity of decoder’s implementation lies in fast search of the symbol encoded from the bit-stream without consuming large memory. These two requirements are conflicting and in addition, the standards do have multiple tables of large code length. This paper describes implementation of three different Huffman decoding techniques, discusses their relative merits/demerits and also suggests MIPS and Memory efficient Huffman Decoder.

Author Satish D Warhade

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