Low battery consumption will be a key to success for IoT products, and chip makers are working on more frugal processors and microcontrollers to make that happen.

Improved energy efficiency was a common theme at the Electronica conference in Munich this week, where next-generation IoT chipsets were plentiful.

Energy efficiency “is very important indeed, because in many cases you are talking about devices that run on batteries and the battery life has an effect on how affordable and practical it will be to deploy them,” said Matt Hatton, director at Machina Research.

San Jose-based Atmel was at the conference to launch the SAM L21 microcontroller family, which consumes one-third the power of comparable products in the market today, according to the company. Limited numbers of the product will be available from February, for use in consumer, industrial and portable medical products, Atmel said.

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