Learn Basics of AVR Atmega32A Microcontroller

This article is for beginners to learn basics of AVR Atmega32A Microcontroller. This tutorial covers some important key parts of Atmega32A chip, which programmer must know before programming AVR chip. The description provided is intended to get reader know physical chip along with internal architecture. If reader is curious enough to know about each point in detail. In that case, we recommend you to go through datasheet.

The focus here is on features and when we say AVR in this post, it means 8-bit AVR because in recent days AVR chips evolved up to 32-bit AVR and AVR with FPGA. I want to be very specific with 8-bit AVR. Let’s take an example of ATmega32A microcontroller which is 8-bit and 40 pin AVR chip. If you look at picture given below, one can say this chip physically looks similar to any IC in your house hold electronic gadget, also we will find each pin has specific number and in bracket function mentioned in it’s abbreviated form. However, you could able to recognize some name like GND (ground) and VCC (Power Supply). Don’t worry if it’s all looks new at first sight. Later part of this post, we’ll look in details about each pin.

 IMPORTANT

As mentioned earlier that IC has 40 pins and each pin has its particular number and names associated with it. On IC there is an notch and besides of this notch there is little dot and closest pin to this dot represent pin number #1 so from there on you could start numbering (If in case you want detail description about each pin then I recommend you to read ATmega32A datasheet).

AVR is a modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single chip microcontroller. The program and data are stored in separate physical memory system that appears in different address spaces but it has ability to read data item from program memory using special instruction. It’s nearly impossible to discuss individual part but if you look at basic device overview, In this article we are going to look at megaAVR,

BASIC FAMILIES

• Tiny AVR – the AT tiny series
• megaAVR – the ATmega series*                         
• XMEGA – the ATxmega series

DEVICE ARCHITECTURE

Flash, EEPROM and SRAM are all integrated on single chip. AVR does not need external memory in most applications. Some devices have parallel external bus optional to allow adding additional data memory or memory mapped devices.(Read more on next page)