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Devices like medical implants and remote sensors etc, are required to operate with very low energy dissipation for longer battery-life. For such ultra-low energy devices, the sub-threshold design is an essential design technique for reducing the energy dissipation of a circuit. An important aspect of this technique is to model the energy dissipation of each design component (and if possible whole design) in sub-threshold domain. This thesis presents the energy characterization of two 32-bit microprocessors, namely LEON-3 and Cortex-M0, in sub-threshold domain. For this study, a high-level energy characterization model was used to analyze the energy dissipation and operating-frequency trends of these two microprocessors. The sub-threshold designing can be combined with other energy saving techniques, like clock-gating, multi-VDD and power gating etc, to further improve the energy efficiency of a design. In this thesis, the sub-threshold analysis is performed with and without clock-gating. The results from energy model show that by using a sub-threshold supply voltage and clock-gating, the energy dissipation of bot