Atmel
More info
- Creator
- George Perlegos
- Released
- 1984–2016
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Successor
- Microchip Technology
A memory maker that happened to produce AVR — the microcontroller in almost every Arduino and therefore in a generation of hobby projects.
Atmel was founded in San Jose in 1984 and started out making EEPROM and flash memory. That expertise turned out to be decisive for AVR, an 8-bit RISC architecture designed by two Norwegian students at NTH in Trondheim, Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan, and brought in-house by Atmel. AVR was among the first microcontrollers with on-chip flash, so a program could be rewritten in seconds rather than by burning a new part.
A free GCC port and easy programming made AVR the obvious choice when Arduino was created in 2005; the ATmega328P on the Arduino Uno is probably Atmel's best-known product. In 2016 the company was bought by Microchip, whose PIC line AVR had spent two decades competing against.