Avr chips
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Avr chips
AVR chips were built on technology of an 8bit RISC microprocessor, with designs on making faster execution of commands through simplified code, and by the utilization of flash memory. Because flash memory is very reliable and powerful, it allowed for the first time, the storage of programs upon a micro controller in that format. This new breed of architecture was developed by Atmel, bringing it into the mainstream of industry and home enthusiasts to further better development of robots. The AVR microprocessor comes in different configurations, to help pinpoint one that would be for the use for end user. From the car manufacturing industry, to the pastime of building remote control vehicles, AVR chips play a major role. Because they are built upon fast technology, AVR chips are efficient and reliable when it comes to needing the power to operate in their tasks. AVR chips are efficient because they operate on a pipeline design that has two stages. Basically, as one command is being executed, another one is already being obtained in order to speed up the processing, so that there is no waiting time. With the built in array of flash, EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) and SRAM memory, AVR’s are popular chips because of how easy they are to program and write code for. For the duration of their life they are fully upgradeable and come loaded with pre-programmed firmware. Whatever the programming code, AVR is a popular choice. All of the command processes running through this efficient pipeline design are done at very high clock speeds, and the AVR micro controllers are regarded as being some of the fastest amongst all 8bit chips available on the market today. Being able to compile programs and scripts in C programming, allows for more efficiency, as the universal programming language is clean and concise. The more simple the code, the quicker it will run, and this is what makes building circuitry with AVR’s so popular for both industry and hobbyist. AVR chips are so versatile, reliable and efficient that they have created a whole market niche of their own. There are communities on the Internet dedicated to their usage, and it is quite a world away from the humble beginnings of the architecture being designed by two Norwegian students. By having the ability to combine different types of memory onto the one chip, it allowed a lot of freedom, as the micro controller not needed to tap into any external memory. This meant that this new breed of micro controller was lightweight in terms of power and memory consumption, yet was able to pack a very potent punch in processing.