Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which account for more than 80% of its revenue. TI also produces digital light processing technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, and multi-core processors.
Texas Instruments emerged in 1951 after a reorganization of Geophysical Service Incorporated, a company founded in 1930 that manufactured equipment for use in the seismic industry, as well as defense electronics. TI produced the world's first commercial silicon transistor in 1954, and the same year designed and manufactured the first transistor radio. Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TI's Central Research Labs. TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller in 1970, which combined all the elements of computing onto one piece of silicon.
In 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device, which serves as the foundation for the company's DLP technology and DLP Cinema. TI released the popular TI-81 calculator in 1990, which made it a leader in the graphing calculator industry. Its defense business was sold to Raytheon Company in 1997; this allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions. After the acquisition of National Semiconductor in 2011, the company had a combined portfolio of 45,000 analog products and customer design tools. In the stock market, Texas Instruments is often regarded as an indicator for the semiconductor and electronics industry as a whole, since the company sells to more than 100,000 customers.
History
Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty in 1951. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941. In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing division, which focused on electronic equipment. By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc. Because a firm named General Instrument already existed, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. From 1956 to 1961, Fred Agnich of Dallas, later a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, was the Texas Instruments president. Geophysical Service, Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Early in 1988, most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company.Geophysical Service Incorporated
In 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service, an early provider of seismic exploration services to the petroleum industry. In 1939, the company reorganized as Coronado Corp, an oil company with Geophysical Service Inc, now as a subsidiary. On December 6, 1941, McDermott along with three other GSI employees, J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H. B. Peacock purchased GSI. During World War II, GSI expanded its services to include electronics for the U.S. Army, Army Signal Corps, and U.S. Navy. In 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, spun off to build seismographs for oil explorations and with GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company.An early success came for TI-GSI in 1965, when GSI was able to monitor the Soviet Union's underground nuclear weapons testing under the ocean in Vela Uniform, a subset of Project Vela, to verify compliance of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Texas Instruments also continued to manufacture equipment for use in the seismic industry, and GSI continued to provide seismic services. After selling GSI, TI finally sold the company to Halliburton in 1988, after which sale GSI ceased to exist as a separate entity.
Semiconductors
In early 1952, Texas Instruments purchased a patent license to produce germanium transistors from Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, for US$25,000, beginning production by the end of the year. Haggerty brought Gordon Teal to the company due to his expertise in growing semiconductor crystals while at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Teal's first assignment was to direct TI's research laboratory. At the end of 1952, Texas Instruments announced that it had expanded to 2,000 employees and $17 million in sales.Among his new hires was Willis Adcock, who joined TI early in 1953. Adcock, who like Teal was a physical chemist, began leading a small research group focused on the task of fabricating grown-junction, silicon, single-crystal, small-signal transistors. Adcock later became the first TI Principal Fellow.
First silicon transistor and integrated circuits
In January 1954, Morris Tanenbaum at Bell Telephone Laboratories created the first workable silicon transistor. This work was reported in the spring of 1954, at the IRE off-the-record conference on solid-state devices, and was later published in the Journal of Applied Physics. Working independently in April 1954, Gordon Teal at TI created the first commercial silicon transistor and tested it on April 14, 1954. On May 10, 1954, at the Institute of Radio Engineers National Conference on Airborne Electronics in Dayton, Ohio, Teal presented a paper: "Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices".In 1954, Texas Instruments designed and manufactured the first transistor radio. The Regency TR-1 used germanium transistors, as silicon transistors were much more expensive at the time. This was an effort by Haggerty to increase market demand for transistors.
Jack Kilby, an employee at TI, invented the integrated circuit in 1958. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, and successfully demonstrated the world's first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958. Six months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor independently developed the integrated circuit with integrated interconnect, and is also considered an inventor of the integrated circuit. In 1969, Kilby was awarded the National Medal of Science, and in 1982 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. Kilby also won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the integrated circuit. Noyce's chip, made at Fairchild, was made of silicon, while Kilby's chip was made of germanium. In 2008, TI named its new development laboratory "Kilby Labs" after Jack Kilby.
Standard TTL
The 7400 series of transistor-transistor logic chips, developed by Texas Instruments in the 1960s, popularized the use of integrated circuits in computer logic. The military-grade version of this was the 5400 series.Microprocessor
Texas Instruments invented the hand-held calculator in 1967 and the single-chip microcomputer in 1971, was assigned the first patent on a single-chip microprocessor on September 4, 1973. This was disputed by Gilbert Hyatt, formerly of the Micro Computer Company, in August 1990, when he was awarded a patent superseding TI's. This was overturned on June 19, 1996, in favor of TI.First speech synthesis chip
In 1978, Texas Instruments introduced the first single-chip linear predictive coding speech synthesizer. In 1976, TI began a feasibility study of memory-intensive applications for bubble memory then being developed. They soon focused on speech applications. This resulted in the development of the TMC0280 one-chip linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, which was the first time a single silicon chip had electronically replicated the human voice. This was used in several TI commercial products beginning with Speak & Spell, which was introduced at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978. In 2001, TI left the speech synthesis business, selling it to Sensory Inc. of Santa Clara, California.Consumer electronics and computers
In May 1954, Texas Instruments designed and built a prototype of the world's first transistor radio, and, through a partnership with Industrial Development Engineering Associates of Indianapolis, Indiana, the 100% solid-state radio was sold to the public beginning in October of that year.In the 1960s, company president Pat Haggerty had a team that included Jack Kilby to work on a handheld calculator project. Kilby and two other colleagues created the Cal-Tech, a three-pound battery-powered calculator that could do basic math and fit six-digit numbers on its display. This 4.25 x 6.15 x 1.75 inch calculator's processor would originate the vast majority of Texas Instruments’ revenue.
In 1973, the handheld calculator SR-10 and in 1974, the handheld scientific calculator SR-50 were issued by TI. Both had red LED-segments numeric displays. The optical design of the SR-50 is somewhat similar to the HP-35 edited by Hewlett-Packard before in early 1972, but buttons for the operations "+", "–",... are in the right of the number block and the decimal point lies between two neighboring digits.
TI continued to be active in the consumer electronics market through the 1970s and 1980s. Early on, this also included two digital clock models – one for desk and the other a bedside alarm. From this sprang what became the Time Products Division, which made LED watches. Though these LED watches enjoyed early commercial success due to excellent quality, it was short-lived due to poor battery life. LEDs were replaced with LCD watches for a short time, but these could not compete because of styling issues, excessive makes and models, and price points. The watches were manufactured in Dallas and then Lubbock, Texas. Several spin-offs of the Speak & Spell, such as the Speak & Read and Speak & Math, were introduced soon thereafter.
In 1979, TI entered the home computer market with the TI-99/4, a competitor to computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and the later Atari 400/800 and VIC-20. By late 1982, TI was dominating the U.S. home computer market, shipping 5,000 computers a day from their factory in Lubbock. It discontinued the TI-99/4A, the sequel to the 99/4, in late 1983 amid an intense price war waged primarily against Commodore. At the 1983 Winter CES, TI showed models 99/2 and the Compact Computer 40, the latter aimed at professional users. The TI Professional ultimately joined the ranks of the many unsuccessful MS-DOS and x86-based—but non-compatible—competitors to the IBM PC. The company for years successfully made and sold PC-compatible laptops before withdrawing from the market and selling its product line to Acer in 1998.