Atmel Corporation

Atmel was founded in 1984 in San Jose by George Perlegos, a Stanford-trained engineer who had previously led memory-chip design at Intel. The name was an acronym: Advanced Technology for Memory and Logic. For its first four years the firm was fabless, designing nonvolatile-memory chips and contracting the wafer manufacture out; in 1989, Perlegos convinced venture investors to fund the acquisition of Honeywell’s Colorado Springs semiconductor fab, and Atmel began fabricating in-house. Over the following two decades the company became one of the principal designers of low-power microcontrollers for the embedded-systems industry — the AVR and, later, ARM-based SAM microcontroller families are still on hobbyist workbenches and inside industrial controllers around the world. Atmel was acquired by Microchip Technology in July 2016 for approximately $3.56 billion and now operates as a set of product lines within Microchip’s microcontroller and memory portfolio.

The firm designed and manufactured microcontrollers, EEPROM and flash memory, radio-frequency devices (including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), touch sensors, and security chips for the embedded-systems industry. Its 8-bit AVR family — introduced in 1996 and the microcontroller on which the Arduino open-source hardware platform was built — became one of the most-used microcontroller architectures in hobby electronics and in industrial and automotive embedded design. The 32-bit ARM-based SAM microcontrollers followed. Manufacturing was concentrated at the Colorado Springs fab (still in operation under Microchip), with design centres in California, Colorado, France, and Norway.

Atmel’s distinguishing position among mid-size semiconductor firms was the vertical span it maintained: architecture and instruction-set design (the AVR core is a University-of-Trondheim collaboration Atmel commercialised in the mid-1990s), fabrication, packaging, and end-market applications engineering, all held together in a single firm. That span made the AVR platform an unusually approachable microcontroller for the education and open-source-hardware communities — including the Arduino project, which chose the ATmega series as its default microcontroller in 2005 and effectively made Atmel silicon the standard on which a generation of embedded engineers learned to build.