AVR microcontrollers

AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel, acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016. They are 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers based on a modified Harvard architecture. AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.

AVR microcontrollers are used numerously as embedded systems. They are especially common in hobbyist and educational embedded applications, popularized by their inclusion in many of the Arduino line of open hardware development boards.

The AVR 8-bit microcontroller architecture was introduced in 1997. By 2003, Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers.^[1]