On the maximization of the sustained switching activity in a processor

Recently, several application areas in the test domain (e.g., burn-in and aging monitoring) started to require suitable input stimuli, able to maximize the switching activity of a certain module for a certain period of time. If the module is part of a processor, this turns into identifying a suitable sequence of instructions, able to maximize the switching activity. This paper proposes a method to attack this problem, and reports some experimental results gathered on a MIPS-like pipelined processor.