Texas Instruments Incorporated

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Texas Instruments-Nspire graphing calculator.

Der Messer

Texas Instruments Incorporated, American manufacturer of calculators, microprocessors, and digital signal processors with its headquarters in Dallas, Texas.

The direct antecedent to the company was founded May 16, 1930, by John Clarence (“Doc”) Karcher and Eugene McDermott to provide seismographic data for the petroleum industry. Incorporated as Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) in 1938, the company was renamed Coronado Corporation the next year, and GSI was turned into a subsidiary. On December 6, 1941, Eugene McDermott, Cecil Green, Erik Jonsson, and H.B. Peacock bought GSI.

World War II transformed the company into an electronics firm. GSI developed submarine detection devices for the U.S. Navy, applying technologies used to locate oil before the war. Carried aboard low-flying aircraft, the devices could detect magnetic disturbances caused by submarines beneath the ocean’s surface. The navy assigned Lieutenant Patrick Haggerty to monitor and manage GSI’s contract, and at war’s end he accepted a position as head of GSI’s new laboratory and manufacturing division. Defense technology was the key to dominance in the early electronics industry; companies that could adapt wartime technologies to peacetime use had a critical head start on competitors.

In 1951 the company changed its name to Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) in order to reflect growing diversification in the company’s business. The following year TI purchased a license from Western Electric to manufacture transistors, which Haggerty believed could be integrated into a profitable new generation of consumer goods. To prove his point, Haggerty established the TI semiconductor division and oversaw the development and production of the world’s first transistor radio. Designed by TI and manufactured and marketed by Industrial Development Engineering Associates, the Regency radio was a best seller for the 1954 Christmas season. The use of transistors reduced the radio’s size and power consumption, enabling it to fit in a large pocket or purse. Profits were considerable, and TI was established as a major electronics firm. From 1954 to 1958 TI was the only firm capable of producing silicon transistors in quantity.

In 1958 Jack Kilby, a researcher at TI, coinvented the integrated circuit (IC). (Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation independently invented the IC later that same year.) Haggerty, who had just become TI’s president, recognized that developing the IC would demand resources far beyond his company’s funding capabilities. Fortuitously for TI, the U.S. Air Force began a major program to close the “missile gap” following the launch in 1957 of a ballistic missile by the Soviet Union. TI, already a prime supplier of semiconductor circuits for the military, received funding to develop ICs for use in ballistic missile guidance systems. The Minuteman missile, which became the principal American land-based nuclear missile following its deployment in 1962, relied on ICs made by TI. In 1964 the first consumer product containing an IC appeared, a hearing aid designed and manufactured in collaboration with Zenith Radio Corporation.

Haggerty wanted to develop mass consumer applications for ICs, and so in 1965 he commissioned Kilby to design an affordable electronic pocket calculator. By 1967, the same year that Haggerty became TI’s chairman, Kilby succeeded in inventing the basic design for hand-held calculators. In 1972 the TI Datamath pocket calculator was introduced. TI had reduced the number of ICs in this calculator to one—drastically reducing the manufacturing cost—and the success of the Datamath and subsequent TI scientific calculators transformed the company into a major consumer electronics firm.

TI also demonstrated the first solid-state radar in 1967 (patents were awarded in 1968). This breakthrough reduced the size and cost of radar units while improving reliability—important considerations for airborne and portable ground-based radar detection and communication devices. When Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, various TI semiconductor components were on board.

Starting in 1959, TI became a global corporation by acquiring and building semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia. The 1970s saw continued growth in TI’s semiconductor business, particularly after 1973, when the company began manufacturing dynamic random-access memory (DRAM, commonly shortened to RAM) chips for use in computers. In 1978 TI introduced the first single-chip speech synthesizer; it was used in the company’s Speak & Spell™ learning toy for young children.

Innovations continued in the 1980s and ’90s at TI. In 1982 TI introduced the first single-chip digital signal processor (DSP), a market that the company went on to dominate. By 1997 TI’s revenue from DSPs—the control units in digital cellular telephones, automobile brake systems, stereophonic sound systems, and computer modems—exceeded $1.4 billion. Another application for DSPs appeared in 1997 when TI developed a special biochemical DSP for use in portable devices that could detect bacteria or other pathogens in food and water, in real time, at remote locations.

A related semiconductor product, the digital light processor (DLP), was invented by Larry Hornbeck at TI in 1987. In 1993 the company formed its Digital Imaging division to commercialize the invention. The first DLP-based projection systems soon followed, and in 2001 Mitsubishi introduced the first DLP HDTV (high-definition television).

TI established the Jack Kilby Research Center in 1997 to honour the inventor who made so many breakthroughs possible and to incubate another generation of innovators.

In 1997 TI began consolidating its business by selling its defense-related division to the Raytheon Company, its memory chip division to Micron Technologies Inc., and its software division to Sterling Software. Over the next few years TI acquired numerous smaller companies involved in semiconductor and DSP design and manufacturing. It also opened new design and fabrication facilities in 1999 in China, Denmark, and Israel. Further consolidation at TI took place in 2006, with the company selling its Sensors & Controls division to Bain Capital, Inc. This left TI with just two divisions: Semiconductors and Educational Technology (primarily calculators).