Atmega32A - Architecture and Features

            The Atmel®AVR® ATmega32A is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture.As discussed earlier Atmega32A is a Mega AVR which has 32KB of Program memory and an Advanced AVR RISC Architecture. ATmega comes in two packages,DIP and TQFP packages.DIP package has 40 pins while TQFP's have 44 pins.DIP's are better used as it requires no soldering when used on a simple breadboard compared to TQFP which needs to be soldered to Targetboard. TQFP's are used in applications where the size of the board is to be decresaed and the board can be mass manufactured by standard PCB manufacturers only. RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. A more detail of the RISC architecture is here. In short RISC architecture helps in fast execution of the instructions, by providing a separate space for instructions, called the FLASH Memory, thus separating the program instructions from the program data.

     

AVR Family Overview

ATmega32A is a microcontroller from ATmega series of AVR microcontrollers manufactured by Atmel manufacturers. The AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.

       

             Another interesting fact is that AVR architecture was devised by two students at Norwegian Institute of Technology  Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan.AVR is not an acronym but it is univeraslly accepted that it is named after it's designers as Alf (Egil Bogen) and Vegard (Wollan)'s Risc processor.The whole AVR family of Microcontrollers are categorised into six groups as follows

• Tiny AVR's
• Mega AVR's
• Xmega AVR's
• AVR's with FPGA
• 32-bit AVR's and
• Application specific AVR's

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.