Category: The Arduino ARM Family

The phrases “8 bits”, “32 bits”, and “64 bits” are seen quite frequently these days, but what do they really mean? They mean that microcontroller’s internal pathways can carry that many bits of data at the same time. At the very least, this means that whenever a 32-bit microcontroller wants to get information from memory,…

Both AVR and ARM refer to families of devices. The ARM architecture was developed by the ARM company and is licensed to other companies, while the AVR architecture was developed by Atmel and pretty much stayed within Atmel (now owned by Microchip). Both AVR and ARM are microprocessors. AVR never appears as a stand-alone microprocessor,…

The original Arduino family of boards was based on Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers. These devices are excellent in terms of price, flexibility, and ease of use, but the limited processing speed and small memory size make it difficult to support modern networking protocols. Arduino has taken advantage of the availability of low-cost 32-bit microcontrollers based…