How it started
Founding and 1980s growth
Atmel Corporation was founded in 1984, by George Perlegos. Atmel was an acronym for "advanced technology for memory and logic". Perlegos had worked in the memory group of Intel in the 1970s and had co-founded Seeq Technology to manufacture EPROM memory. Using only US$30,000 in capital, Atmel was initially operated as a fabless company, using Sanyo and General Instrument to make the chip wafers.
The first Atmel memory products used less power than competitors. Customers included Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson. In 1987, Intel sued Atmel for patent infringement. Rather than fight the patent claim, Atmel redesigned its products to use different intellectual property. These had better performance and even lower power consumption. In addition, Atmel then entered the flash memory business that Intel had focused on. Atmel used US$60 million in venture capital for the 1989 purchase of a fabrication facility from Honeywell in Colorado Springs. Atmel then invested another US$30 million in manufacturing technology.
1990s expansion
In 1991, Atmel expanded the Colorado facility after acquiring Concurrent Logic, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) manufacturer. The company made its initial public offering (IPO) in 1991 which yielded more than US$65 million. 1994 saw Atmel enter the microprocessor market. The first Atmel flash memory microcontroller was based on the Intel 8051.
The controller executed an instruction for every clock cycle, as opposed to the 12 cycles that legacy 8051 parts required.
From Wikipedia’s article on Atmel, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2