Embedded systems today have become ubiquitous and they play a very significant role in all aspects of our lives. Due to their compact size, low cost and simple design aspects, embedded systems have become very popular and affect almost all aspects of our lives. They are found everywhere from kitchen appliances to space craft. They span all aspects of modern life from various applications such as biomedical instrumentation, communication systems, peripheral controllers of a computer and industrial instrumentation to scientific applications.
Since larger memory is always associated with higher cost, increased chip area and increased power consumption, the primary goal has always been to keep the memory at a minimum. One way to use the available memory more efficiently is to compress the program code and store it in a compressed form. The compressed code is decompressed on the fly as and when needed by the processor. In this thesis, we have discussed one code compression technique known as bitmask based code compression algorithm in detail and have implemented it on Texas Instrument’s MSP430 microcontroller. Using this technique, we were able to achieve a compression ratio of about 62-76%. We also compared our results to other compression technologies in the literature.