Today’s technology market demands microcontrollers with higher performance combined with lower power consumption. To meet the tough requirements of modern microcontrollers, Microchip has combined ten years of low power research and development into picoPower technology with AVR microcontrollers. PicoPower enables the AVR to achieve the industry’s lowest power consumption at 500nA with a real time counter running and 27nA in Power Down sleep mode. PicoPower Technology incorporates a number of innovative techniques for lower power consumption in sleep and active mode including: true 1.8V supply voltage, minimized leakage current, sleeping BOD (brown out detector), ultra low power 32 kHz crystal oscillator, digital input disable registers, power reduction register, clock gating, and flash sampling. PicoPower technology is incorporated in most of Microchip's 8- and 32-bit AVR devices including the tinyAVR, megaAVR, XMEGA and UC3L AVR32 product families.