Powering Down 32-Bit MCUs

32-bit microcontrollers are getting designed into pretty much every electronic product. Until recently they were used primarily in industrial and automotive applications, but with improved architectures leading to significantly lower power consumption, MCUs are now being adopted in a broad range of portable and battery-powered applications. The folks at Atmel have introduced a new, ultra low power family of ARM® Cortex™-M4 processor-based MCUs that consume just one-third the power of currently available solutions. Various sleep modes that enable the MCU to shut down unused modules along with software-controlled clock gating are used to tailor the power consumption based on the application’s requirement. In addition, unused peripherals can also be fully shut down individually and enabled again during runtime, further lowering power consumption without compromising system operation. Learn more about SAM4L devices.