Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable fault tolerant monitoring and control of a variety of applications. Due to the large number of microsensor nodes that may be deployed and the need for long system lifetimes, replacing the battery is not an option. Sensor systems must utilize the minimal possible energy while operating over a wide range of operating scenarios. This paper presents an overview of the key technologies required for low-energy distributed microsensors. These include power aware computation/communication component technology, low-energy signaling and networking, system partitioning based on computation and communication tradeoffs, and a power aware software infrastructure.