Deep-sub-voltage nanoelectronics are integrated circuits (ics) operating near theoretical limit (fundamental, technological, design methodological, architectural, algorithmic) on energy consumption per 1 bit processing. New classes of applications such as wireless sensor networks or microsystems have dramatically different requirements from traditional nanoelectronics (logically irreversible manipulation of information) where performance (i.e., frequency) is primary metric of interest. For new devices, energy per instruction may be a more sensible metric.

Source