The AVR Microcontroller Family

8-bit chips with a simple, friendly design.

AVR chips use a clean 8-bit design in which most instructions finish in one or two clock ticks. Many hobby boards are built around them.

They have a small set of general-purpose registers, flash for the program, SRAM for data and a dedicated EEPROM. Peripherals are controlled by memory-mapped registers.

The free GNU toolchain compiles C and C++ for AVR, so no paid software is required.