The Atmel AVR XMEGA is a family of low power, high performance, and peripheral rich 8/16-bit microcontrollers based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. By executing instructions in a single clock cycle, the AVR XMEGA devices achieve CPU throughput approaching one million instructions per second (MIPS) per megahertz, allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed.
The AVR CPU combines a rich instruction set with 32 general purpose working registers. All 32 registers are directly connected to the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), allowing two independent registers to be accessed in a single instruction, executed in one clock cycle. The resulting architecture is more code efficient while achieving throughputs many times faster than conventional single-accumulator or CISC based microcontrollers.
