So he tried his hand with some really small SMD parts by building this USB to serial Arduino programmer. The chip he went with isn’t the FTDI part we’re used to. Instead of using an FT232RL ...

Based an Atmel’s ARM Cortex-M0+ chip, it’s built on a faster processor than the AVR Arduini, and it includes Atmel’s Embedded Debugger which serves as a USB-to-serial channel and on-chip ...