Atmel

» see atmel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

George Perlegos founded Atmel in San Jose in 1984 after leaving Intel, where he had worked on EPROM memory. The name is an acronym nobody ever expands out loud: advanced technology for memory and logic. The founding idea was memory, and specifically nonvolatile memory built on a standard logic process, which made it cheap enough to put somewhere a memory chip had not been before.

Where it went was onto the microcontroller. In 1994 Atmel started shipping 8051-compatible parts with flash on board instead of the UV-erasable windows that the industry had lived with for a decade, and the difference in a lab was not subtle. You reprogrammed a part in seconds rather than putting it under a lamp for twenty minutes. Atmel's own 8051 variants also ran an instruction per clock cycle against the twelve cycles the legacy parts needed, so they were faster as well as more convenient.

The AVR arrived in 1996 out of a design team in Trondheim, Norway, and it is the thing the company will be remembered for. It was an 8-bit RISC architecture designed with a C compiler in mind rather than retrofitted for one, which made it pleasant in a way its competitors were not. By the late 2000s Atmel had revenue in the billion-dollar range and roughly 4,700 people.

~ the case file ~

~ the chip that outlived the company ~

In 2005 a group in Ivrea, Italy, building a cheap prototyping board for design students picked the ATmega8 to put on it. That board was the Arduino. Every classroom kit and hobby robot for the next decade ran on an Atmel part, usually the ATmega328P, and almost nobody using one could have told you whose chip it was. The Arduino Uno still ships with that part number today, ten years after the company that designed it stopped existing.

I came to Atmel the way most engineers my age did, through the hobby end rather than through a purchase order. This is the category I still work in, edge hardware where a small controller does something local before anything reaches a network, and the ATmega remains the part I would hand somebody who had never programmed a chip before. There is a real distance between that and the company: I used its silicon for years and never once thought about Atmel as a business with a share price and a board of directors.

~ the takeover fight ~

The end was a bidding sequence rather than a decline. Dialog Semiconductor agreed to buy Atmel in September 2015 in a cash-and-stock deal valued around 4.6 billion dollars. Dialog's share price then fell far enough that the offer shrank with it, and Microchip Technology came over the top in January 2016 with 8.15 dollars a share in cash and stock. Atmel paid Dialog a 137.3 million dollar break fee to walk away.

Microchip signed the merger agreement on 19 January 2016 and closed it on 4 April, for a total equity value of about 3.47 billion dollars. The AVR line was kept. Microchip already sold the PIC, which had been the AVR's rival in every hobbyist argument for twenty years, so the acquisition put both sides of that argument on the same price list. The Atmel name was retired over the following year. Bare atmel.com no longer resolves at all now, and www.atmel.com redirects to a page filed under Microchip's corporate-overview acquisitions list, which is a tidier grave marker than most companies get.

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