Recent techniques of severe plastic deformation including variants of rolling, equi-channel angular pressing and friction stir processing were used to enhance tensile properties of single phase, quasi-single phase and two phase alloys by grain refinement and substructural development. This led to the feasibility of mechanical processing of not only brittle material like hypereutectic Al-Si alloys, composites, and Mg alloys but also improved strengthening of ductile materials like Type 304 stainless steel. Presented here is a review of the recent works done in the author's group along with that emerged from collaboration elsewhere. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.