A compression engine may be designed for more efficient error checking of a compressed stream, to include adaptation of a heterogeneous design that includes interleaved hardware and software stages of compression and decompression. An output of a string matcher may be reversed to generate a bit stream, which is then compared with an input stream to the compression engine as a first error check. A final compressed output of the compression engine may be partially decompressed to reverse entropy code encoding of an entropy code encoder. The partially decompressed output may be compared with an output of an entropy code generator to perform a second error check. Finding an error at the first error check greatly reduces the latency of generating a fault or exception, as does performing computing-intensive aspects of the compression and decompression with software instead of specialized hardware.