For mass production, it is recommended to use dedicated production programmers that are designed to operate in production environments and which have software intended for volume production. The application note “AT06015: Production Programming of Microchip AVR® and SAM microcontrollers” lists 3rd party production programming tools for both Microchip AVR and SAM microcontrollers.
The Atmel-ICE is a powerful development tool for debugging and programming AVR and ARM® Cortex®-M-based SAM microcontrollers. Though the Atmel-ICE is not intended for production programming, some users choose to use it for small-scale production programming because it is very affordable, and because it is already well known from the development phase of the product. To speed up the development of the user's production programming tool, this application note gives a detailed introduction to the Atmel-ICE setup, driver installation, user guide of the Atmel-Studio command line utility (atprogram.exe), and a PC programming tool project written in C#. The Visual C# example project can be downloaded along with this application note and run with the ATmega328PB Xplained Mini kit.