Data compression/decompression method and apparatus

摘要

The present invention relates to a data compression techniques and is of particular relevance to embedded devices having a flash-prom. Data compression techniques have been known for many years. Devices such as mobile telecommunications handsets, personal digital assistants and vehicular navigation systems do not support access to data storage systems such as hard or floppy devices and their operating system and applications are typically stored on d flash-PROM that is associated with the embedded device. Flash-proms, suffer, in the main from being rather slow. Flash-proms are also expensive. The present invention seeks to provide a data compression/decompression arrangement which can reduce flash-PROM usage without increasing boot-up time and provides a method for processing information in a data processor operable to process data to provide a sequence of uncompressed and compressed data blocks, whereby each block comprises an even number of bytes. The invention can enable a reduction in boot-up time for systems.