The USARTs are capable of UART, SPI and I²S capabilities, while the LE UART enables 9600 baud communication while the MCU is in deep sleep, consuming just 150nA. This allows the maintaining of communication with external devices/sensors without taking a huge hit to energy usage. The majority of the on-board timers operate in sleep modes, and the new Cryotimer takes this one step further, allowing timekeeping all the way down to shutoff mode. The Cryotimer has a maximum wake period of 194 days which can be used to bring the Gecko out of it’s lowest energy mode periodically. All analog modules have sleep mode capability. Of particular note, the ADC can do 12-bit conversions at 1Msps rate while only consuming 190µA. In addition the analog subsystem has an all-new “APORT” analog mux, which allows virtually any pin on the chip to be assigned any analog function. This is much more flexible than a traditional fixed “pin mux”. In conventional solutions, even a peripheral engineered to work autonomously does so in isolation. Any task requiring multiple peripherals to work together requires waking up the current consuming CPU to manage the coordination. The Peripheral Reflex System (PRS) enables peripherals to work together while the CPU remains asleep. Complex task sequencing is possible with PRS, even including logical (Boolean) operations on event triggers. All of this means an application can do more while the CPU is asleep, dramatically lowering overall energy consumption. An example would be routing a timer output to trigger the ADC through the PRS, thus avoiding waking the MCU core. This gives the flexibility to increase battery life or reduce battery size and cost.