Brief history
The AVR architecture was conceived by two students at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan.
The original AVR MCU was developed at a local ASIC house in Trondheim, Norway, called Nordic VLSI at the time, now Nordic Semiconductor, where Bogen and Wollan were working as students.[citation needed] It was known as a μRISC (Micro RISC)[citation needed] and was available as silicon IP/building block from Nordic VLSI.[citation needed] When the technology was sold to Atmel from Nordic VLSI,[citation needed] the internal architecture was further developed by Bogen and Wollan at Atmel Norway, a subsidiary of Atmel. The designers worked closely with compiler writers at IAR Systems to ensure that the instruction set provided for more efficient compilation ofhigh-level languages. Atmel says that the name AVR is not an acronym and does not stand for anything in particular. The creators of the AVR give no definitive answer as to what the term "AVR" stands for. However, it is commonly accepted that AVR stands for Alf (Egil Bogen) and Vegard (Wollan)'s RISC processor. Note that the use of "AVR" in this article generally refers to the 8-bit RISC line of Atmel AVR Microcontrollers.