Packaging Insanity

Last week I ordered a surface mount microcontroller from AVnet for working with a prototyping circuit. It came in the mail today along with a bunch of other components. All is fine, except, well, the packging for this one single component is really intimidating. Look at the pictures below. I’ve put a standard magazine on the side to give you an idea of the size. Can you see what it is?

Turns out to be a surface mount ATmega644, one single piece. Not sure if this is robot packaged or human packaged. Pretty crazy, isn’t it 🙂