Chip Hall of Fame: Atmel ATmega8 – IEEE Spectrum

https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/chip-hall-of-fame-atmel-atmega8

Atmel’s ATmega8 is one of the seed crystals of the modern maker movement. It’s at the heart of the first generation of the Arduino board. ATmega8 and its sibling chips such as the ATmega328P are used in current Arduino’s.

The ATmega8 comes from the AVR line of microcontrollers, originally developed in the early 1990s by two students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

AVR’s use a “Harvard architecture,” in which program memory and working RAM are kept separate.