AVR
More info
- Creator
- Alf-Egil Bogen, Vegard Wollan
- Released
- 1996
- Owner
- Microchip Technology
- Type
- 8-bit RISC architecture
Atmel's 8-bit RISC architecture, designed by two Norwegian students, on which Arduino — and with it a generation of hobbyists — learned to program.
Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan developed the architecture at NTH in Trondheim and took it to Atmel, which shipped the first parts in 1996. AVR was early to put flash on the chip instead of OTP ROM or UV-erasable memory, which made reprogramming cheap. It is a Harvard architecture with 32 general-purpose registers and mostly single-cycle instructions, deliberately shaped to keep C compilers happy.
The families are ATtiny and ATmega; the ATmega328P in the Arduino Uno is the famous one. Microchip bought Atmel in 2016, thereby acquiring the old rival to its own PIC. Programming is usually done with AVRDUDE.