Atmel Extending 8-bit MCU Leadership With Launch of New AVR Products; Reveals Global Winners for AVR Hero Design Contest

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML), a leader in microcontroller (MCU) and touch solutions, today announced the company will be launching six new 4k to 16k Flash devices in the AVR^® Mega MCU family in the second quarter 2014. This is the first of several new AVR MCU families that will be announced throughout 2014, expanding Atmel's leading 8-bit AVR family. The company is also announcing five winners of its AVR Hero design contest at Embedded World Nuremberg 2014.

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With over two decades of MCU experience and leadership, Atmel is investing in innovative technologies and ideas to enable product differentiation for 8- and 32-bit embedded MCU designers. The company delivers highly sophisticated, yet easy-to-use 8-bit AVR MCUs allowing everyone from professionals, hobbyists, students and makers to develop embedded designs that could lead to the next 'killer app' in the dawn of the Internet of Things. Atmel has a strong tradition of investing in the Maker community, with the majority of Ardunio boards on the market being powered by Atmel AVR MCUs.

"As a leader in microcontrollers, we are committed to providing differentiated MCUs that are easily accessible and easy-to-use for all communities," Reza Kazerounian, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Microcontroller Business Unit, Atmel Corporation. "With over 200,000 loyalists in our AVR Freaks community and 1.2 million Arduino development boards in the Maker community, our AVRs have definitely made a significant impact in today's Maker and hobbyist circles. With over 65,000 active users in our Studio 6 integrated development environment, we are making it easier for all designers to access our tools."

The new AVR MCUs will be manufactured using advanced 130-nm CMOS technology and will be fully supported by Atmel Studio 6.2, the integrated development platform for developing and debugging Atmel ARM^® Cortex^®-M and AVR MCU-based applications. These devices will deliver a unique combination of performance, power efficiency and design flexibility. Optimized to expedite time-to-market, they are based on the industry's most code-efficient architecture for C and assembly programming. The extensive AVR portfolio, combined with the seamlessly integrated Atmel Studio development platform, makes it easy to reuse knowledge when improving designers' products and expanding to new markets.

To provide a platform for the AVR community, the company launched its global AVR Hero design contest back in September, encouraging contestants to submit videos of creative designs based on Atmel's AVR MCUs. Five winners were selected by public voting on Facebook and through public voting in China between September 17, 2013 and January 31, 2014.

Winners for this year's contest included Sumit Grover and Rahul Karr from India and Juan Luis Gonzalez from Mexico. The grand prize winner was Pamungkas Sumasta from Indonesia.

When contacted about being the grand prize winner of Atmel's AVR contest, Sumasta was delighted: "I am extremely excited to have won the grand prize for this design contest. Atmel's 8-bit AVR MCUs provide the best small footprint controllers available in the market, especially when they are coupled with Arduino support. Atmel AVRs continue to be my MCU of choice."

"Congratulations to our five winners for providing thought-invoking, popular AVR-based designs," said Sander Arts, Vice President of Marketing, Atmel Corporation. "These innovative designs demonstrate the simplicity of Atmel's AVR MCUs, which go beyond the core to help differentiate individual projects. Our AVRs continue to spark the imagination for professional engineers, makers and students in consumer and industrial applications because of its specialized peripherals, real-time performance, high integration and low power."

More Atmel Information
Atmel Atmel AVR Solutions: www.atmel.com/AVR
Atmel YouTube Channel: www.atmel.com/youtube 
Embedded Design Blog: www.atmelcorporation.wordpress.com
Twitter: www.atmel.com/twitter
LinkedIn: www.atmel.com/linkedin 
Facebook: www.atmel.com/facebook 

About Atmel
Atmel Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, capacitive touch solutions, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel provides the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on industrial, consumer, communications, computing and automotive markets.

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SOURCE Atmel Corporation