The PowerWise solutions concept brings together devices, subsystems and system architecture to provide the highest level of performance in a system at the lowest possible energy consumed. To accomplish this metrics were developed to sort devices by the highest performance to the lowest energy consumed. Additionally sub-systems were designed that collectively reduce power and architectures developed that completely revolutionize the way a problem is solved - again greatly reducing power in the overall system. There are currently more than 300 products in the PowerWise family. All of these devices were selected by using 1 of 25 metrics that apply to that family of device. These can include high performance ADCs which are graded by the energy consumed per conversion (e.g. pico-Joules / conversion), or interface devices which are graded on energy per bit transferred. Each metric has a threshold that defines the minimum requirement for inclusion in the PowerWise family of devices. To further reduce power in systems, subsystems are created using a collection of PowerWise devices that when combined together provide even a greater savings in energy. An example can be adaptively lowering the drive current to an LED based on the current battery voltage in a handheld device, or detecting the absence of a cable, thus providing an automatic shutdown mode for the subsystem. These types of features use these collections to go beyond the normal power savings that occur by selecting low power devices. Ultimately, the system architecture can influence how much power is saved. By using novel architectural improvements, such as Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) based Energy Management Units and actively monitoring system performance, overall system energy consumption can be dramatically reduced - in many cases up to 70% or more.