MICRODEM currently only uses uncompressed LAS files.
There are two incompatible tools for lidar point cloud compression, which thankfully do not share the same file extension. If you are a little fish in the ESRI ecosystem and have to stay with their data, the ESRI tool makes some sense. Otherwise, go with LAStools or http://www.laszip.org/ which is open source and in much wider use.
Tools submenu of the file menu has a Compress/Decompress option
Last revised 5/30/2021