

It was known as a μRISC (Micro RISC) and was available as silicon IP/building block from Nordic VLSI. The original AVR MCU was developed at a local ASIC house in Trondheim, Norway, called Nordic VLSI at the time, now Nordic Semiconductor, where Bogen and Wollan were working as students. Note that the use of "AVR" in this article generally refers to the 8-bit RISC line of Atmel AVR microcontrollers.

However, it is commonly accepted that AVR stands for Alf and Vegard's RISC processor. The creators of the AVR give no definitive answer as to what the term "AVR" stands for. Ītmel says that the name AVR is not an acronym and does not stand for anything in particular. The AVR architecture was conceived by two students at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan. 5 Development tools and evaluation kits.
