As far as I'm concerned, anyone using ATMEL-anything gets what they deserve. In a just world, ATMEL, in its entirety, would have been taken out and killed.

I've encountered other non-working or incorrectly specified ATMEL products, that were quietly withdrawn or respecified, but never had the sort of debacle that we encountered with their French-designed ARM. Their EVB didn't work with the one feature that had persuaded my client to use it, namely the SDRAM interface. Their EVB didn't work unless one bought an additional $1k 4MB SRAM board, of which one could only attach one, and that was too small. We subsequently bought and used an EVB, and the associated MCU from Samsung. Their EVB cost $200, worked perfectly, included development software that ATMEL didn't even offer, and their part cost 1/3 of what the French-designed ATMEL part cost. It's not worth suing them over their acts, since the resulting cost to my client was less than $5E6, but, had I had my finger on the button to launch a few nukes ...

There's nothing semantic about that.

Now they're foisting off their suspect MCU's etc, on the developing world where smart developers consume all the "good" parts from other manufacturers, leaving only the stuff that ATMEL sells for the uninitiated.

RE