AVR at a glance
Any AVR microcontroller is an 8-bit computer in a chip designed and manufactured by ATMEL Corporation. It has some RAM and ROM (Flash) as well. There is also an EEPROM memory. Including AVR core CPU, all these are more than enough to say that it is a small computer where you can execute programs stored in Flash memory, run them while operating data in SRAM, and store some constant values in EEPROM. Compared to the actual computer that sits on your table, you can say that AVR core is a CPU like AMD or Pentium. Flash memory would be your hard drive where programs are stored; RAM is RAM nothing to add there. EEPROM can probably be compared to some media devices like CDRW. Anyway, this is only similitude in a different scale. AVR microcontrollers aren’t limited with core CPU and memory. The main thing that makes them valuable (and any other type of microcontroller) – they are rich in peripherals inside the chip. In most cases, you will find USART, I2C, SPI, ADC, Timers/Counters, and a bunch of I/O…
