What is an AVR microcontroller?

Question

is Atmel the only company that makes AVR microchips? what is the difference between AVR microchips and ordinary ones? can an ordinary microcontroller like 8951 or 8051 be programmed on the same programmer kit used to program AVRs or vice versa?

Answer 1

Atmel may have some alternate sources, probably among the Japanese companies, but they are the big supplier of their chips. They would have the greatest variety of parts and best support.

Programmers from a microcontroller manufacturer generally only support that manufacturer's product. 3rd party programmers usually support microncontrollers from many manufacturers. They have different fixtures available for sale for different microprocessors and memory chips.

The basic AVR is pin compatible with the 8051, tho it has a RISC architecture. Thus, easy to program it with same programmer as 8051.

Early microprocessors (like Motorola/Freescale and Intel/Zilog) have complex instructions (CISC machines). They have many different instructions of different lengths, and considerable power, but take differing times to execute. These are somewhat difficult to learn to use, but extremely fast when programmed in assembler. The RISC (reduced instruction set computing) machines have simplier instructions that execute quickly. Some believe these are faster, especially when programmed in high level languages, because compilers are easier to make efficient on the RISC machines. There are modern computers and microcontrollers of both designs.

If you are just interested in the Atmel products, use Atmel development products and programmers. They are supposed to be reasonably priced and capable. If you plan to work with microcontrollers from a variety of manufacturers, a 3rd party system is probably more costly, but makes sense for you.

Answer 2

good question. but most likely not. if the programmer kit you have cant specify BOTH chips then... NO. Harvard ARCH is very out of date, so, someone could have built an assembler/compiler for both by now. but it is a very specific software question. unless some one below me can think of a kit, start contacting colleges for emeritus professors

PS at most the changes between the compilers is minute. just learn the syntax of each compiler. not too hard after you understand macrocode... the biggest difference will be between the ALUs and Memory fetch commands(from my CPU experience)