
Microchip acquires Atmel [pdf] - ChuckMcM
http://www.microchip.com/docs/default-source/announcements-documents/atmel-customer-letter-april-2016.pdf
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ChuckMcM
For me this is an interesting consolidation. Microchip was the "king" of small
chip embedded systems with the PIC series back in the 80's with the PIC16C84
and David Tait's 5 component programmer that you wired up to a parallel port.
Then Atmel's ATMega line started gaining ground and with its selection in the
Arduino and the intense community at avr-freaks it pushed Atmel to the top of
the pile. Neither Microchip nor Atmel chose to license an ARM chip initially
and both wasted time and resources on their own bespoke 16/32 bit
architectures. The price wars that led to making it possible to buy a 32 bit
machine with 8K of RAM and 64K of flash for less half the price of an 8-bit
machine with 2K of RAM and 16K of flash. Such a huge change that it really
turned the world upside down in many ways.

I will be interested to see how this works out for them longer term.

