Lossless Compression of Lookup Tables for Hardware Applications

2026-09-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the prohibitive storage overhead of large look-up tables (LUTs) in edge devices by proposing CompressedLUT, a lossless compression scheme coupled with an efficient hardware decoding architecture. Methodologically, the approach integrates matrix factorization, self-similarity mining, and multi-level compression techniques to maximize the compression ratio with zero precision loss. Furthermore, a lightweight decoder based on addition, arithmetic right shifts, and micro-LUTs is designed to achieve low area consumption and high throughput. Experimental results demonstrate that this scheme significantly reduces hardware resource utilization in scenarios such as nonlinear function computation on FPGAs. The associated tools have been released as open source.

Abstract

Large lookup tables are widely used in hardware to store constant-valued arrays for applications ranging from elementary mathematical operations, such as constant-coefficient multiplication and nonlinear function evaluation, to emerging machine learning models, including table-based neural networks (NNs) and Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs). However, storing extensive tables of constant values can lead to excessive hardware costs in resource-constrained edge devices such as FPGAs. In this paper, we propose CompressedLUT, a lossless compression scheme and its decoder hardware architecture for the efficient storage and retrieval of arbitrary data in hardware. Our method combines decomposition, self-similarities, higher-bit compression, and multilevel compression techniques to maximize table size savings without accuracy loss. Its hardware decoder primarily uses addition, arithmetic right shift, and several small lookup tables, ensuring low area and high throughput. We evaluated CompressedLUT on FPGAs by implementing multiple nonlinear functions, constant-coefficient multipliers (CCMs), and KANs at 12-bit resolution. CompressedLUT is available as an open-source tool.

Problem

• Lossless Compression
• Lookup Tables
• Hardware
• FPGA
• Edge Devices

Innovation

• Lossless Compression
• Lookup Tables
• FPGA
• Hardware Decoder
• Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks