Beside AVRs, Atmel also manufactures Intel 8051 compatible processors and many other IC which have heavy industrial or domestic applications.
The microelectronic technology Atmel uses for all of its chips is reliable.
However, for newly released AVRs there could be problems:
Bad Remark:
Atmel AVR microcontrollers are inexpensive and have an inexpensive development tools but the AVR microcontrollers are not up to par for commercial applications. I used a AVR32 in a comical application and while the chip did have some nice features is also had several bugs in the board support package, drivers, development tools and in the chip itself. To make matters worse each shipment of parts not only had bugs but different bugs requiring a hardware and software change for each shipment. This may not be a big problem for a hobbyist but it’s a disaster for a company that wants to put its product into production. I would not recommend anyone attempt to use an Atmel part in a commercial product unless they want to lose there job.
_Answer: _
Sounds like you had some trouble with AVR32, which is relatively new. However, standard 8-bit AVRs are used all over in successful industrial and commercial products, and this has been the case for many, many years. – wjl Oct 15 '11 at 1:31