Atmel announced it has further simplified the MCU design process with the launch of its integrated development tools platform, a complete hardware and software platform specifically designed to support Atmel® MCUs and its recently shipping ARM® Cortex™-M4-based SAM4L family.
Atmel Corporation and Arduino announced they are collaborating on several development boards using Atmel AVR and ARM-based microcontroller (MCU) products. The new easy-to-use Arduino boards use several Atmel products including the Cortex-M3-based SAM3U MCU, ATmega32U4 and AVR UC3 MCUs.
Atmel Corporation and Arduino announced they are collaborating on several development boards using 
