This doesn’t hold true to the newest generation of Arduino, as those board have replaced the FTDI chip with an ATmega8U2. That’s basically and ATmega8 with native USB handling… fancy.

FTDI Chip has launched a Kickstarter project called NerO to deal with drawbacks it perceives in the widely-used Arduino UNO R3 and, by utilising a crowdfunding platform, get the engineering community ...