The atmega8 16au belongs to the avr microcontroller family by atmel which is based on an entirely new architecture it is a real risc architecture in which the quartz frequency is not internally divided ie a 10 mhz quartz crystal gives an order throughput of 10 million orders per second the relatively low oscillation frequency means that power consumption remains very low all avrs have flash programme memories eeprom data memories and can be programmed in the system programming of the on