With an official press release, yesterday Microchip announced that has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Atmel. The overall value of the operation is 3.56 billion dollars.
It’s for sure a news that will impact all the makers ecosystem. In the past the most common choice for hobbists and professionals was indeed the use of PIC microcontrollers; now Atmel, thanks to Arduino that adopted the AVR processors (and recently also the Cortex ones), is certainly very widespread.