This reference design showcases the performance of the low-energy accelerator (LEA) on MSP430™ FRAM microcontroller (MCUs) in performing advanced filtering and signal processing while maintaining low power on a 16-bit MCU. The LEA provides a boost of 13.8x over a traditional C implementation for a 256-point complex FFT. LEA also provides real-time FIR filtering performance at a high audio sampling rate of 20 kHz.