Reducing power consumption is more than a buzzword. This is a continuous effort from the Microchip design team. Low power consumption is a major design criteria when designing Microchip microcontrollers and this has resulted in the picoPower AVRs seen in the market today. Microchip started this development for the 8-bit processors line, extended it to the 32-bit AVR product line and it is available for Cortex-M4 MCUs too. As the power consumption is dependent on both the process and the device features design engineers can use, it is interesting to see what the results are. If a comparison is made between the lowest power 32-bit AVR from 2007, the UC3B, and the picoPower AVRs from today the power consumption has been greatly improved since then. Great innovations in both process and design has resulted in the UC3L in 2010 which consumes only fraction of what was the case only a couple of years a go. And now Atmel offers the SAM4L, which takes low power consumption to a new level.  The Atmel team is dedicated to low power and will continue to be.