Eden.fm

Source: Dailytech

A joint venture between NEC Labs and Northwestern University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science has done what many experts could not. The team created a software compression infrastructure that requires minimal amounts of additional power and processing. The software, called CRAMES (compressed RAM for embedded systems) is based on the standard LZ0 compression algorithm.

The memory in CRAMES-enabled devices is separated into two regions, one for standard memory storage and one for the compressed data. When an application requests data in the compressed storage area, the hardware stops the software, the operating system accesses the compressed data, decompresses it and then shuttles it into the uncompressed data area where the application can access it normally. The entire process is transparent to the application itself.