> Atmel Corporation was founded in 1984 by George Perlegos, a Greek-American computer scientist. Atmel was an acronym for “advanced technology for memory and logic”.

> In 1996, Atmel formed a design team in Trondheim, Norway to develop the Atmel AVR line of RISC microcontrollers. This team combined technology of former students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with Atmel's expertise in flash memory. ..The AVR chip is the basis of most Arduino open-source development boards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel

My brain also tried to automatically correct the spelling to a more famous(at least in my mind) name, m <-> t.

*sigh, this is the the magic of Branding...