Perhaps an example would help to demonstrate the feature of the GA3 family. One example application for the GA3 family would be electric meters. While electric meters would seem to have an unlimited supply of power they are really under some rather sever power constraints. To the electric company the E-Meter is consuming a valuable commodity. E-Meters are constantly on and monitoring the power. They are required to meet a 10 VA IEC current budget and many power companies are asking for lower power numbers still. To achieve the 10VA target an MCU must consume around 10mA or less. Many MCUs must operate at reduced speed to stay within this budget. The GA3 family can operate at its full 16 MIPS with only 4.9mA. This allows the device to either add function, perhaps running more complex code or a communication stack. The other option is to continue running the device at a slower speed and conserve still more power. The DMA channels on the device move data to peripherals in parallel with the CPUs operation. Once again this frees up the CPU for other functions. An example of a DMA operation could be the transfer of data from the device RAM to a serial channel for an RF communication stack.