Implementation of LZW Data Compression Algorithm on FPGA/CPLD System

We are in a time of "information explosion". A team of researchers from the School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley released a new study [Lyman 2003] that chronicles the information explosion over the past several years. According to the team, during the period of 1999 to 2002, "new stored information grew about 30% a year." Additional facts: "Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes (1 exabyte= 1018 bytes which is approximately equal to all words spoken by human beings) of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks ... The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes (1,024 gigabytes or 240 bytes) of information on its surface, in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections....Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.