In many applications low power usage is highly important. In such applications there will be a need to balance responsiveness with power consumption. A standard low power technique is to limit the amount of time a device spends in active mode by increasing the time spent in low power sleep modes. The features described in this application note allows the device to perform tasks, while active or in a sleep mode, with a very low power consumption. In Standby (STANDBY) sleep mode SAM L21 is capable of switching both clocks and power domains on and off. This means that if the device is configured to do multiple operations in STANDBY, clocks and power domains will only be on when they are needed. This will lower the overall power consumption.
In this application note we will present the available sleep modes and introduce the new low power hardware features Performance Levels, Power Domains, and SleepWalking with Power Domain Gating on the ultra low power SAM L21. The datasheet referred to throughout this document is the SAM L21 datasheet.