Introduction

Isn't it exciting that a small chip doing excitingly extraordinary things. Most of us use Mobiles,laptops,etc which are indeed equipped with a large amount of tiny chips. Does it come to your genius brain any time that how these things work,what are they made of?,how they function and how they are made etc. Don't worry it isn't needed now because of the present fabrication technology.

But it is little exciting to look at how these tiny chips work. These chips are technically called the IC's which means Integrated Circuits. There are different classifications of these Integrated circuits. Broadly defined IC's may be digital or linear. Linear IC's are of better interest since they can be programmed to our requirement. Microprocessors and Microcontrollers belong to this category.

Microprocessors and Microcontrollers play an important role in most of the consumer electronics these days. Of the two Microcontrollers are better preferred since they are easy to handle and work with. On the otherhand microprocessors require a lot of additional elements like Memory,bus controllers,etc.So the simple way to build a small system is using Microcontroller.

There are different types of Microcontrollers depending upon the number of bits it can operate at a time like 8-bit,16-bit,32-bit. Here we shall deal with a simple 8-bit Microcontroller from the Atmel Corporation the Atmega 32A microcontroller. We shall discuss the architecture,different features,Programming,interfacing with different sensors and real time applications with a few projects.