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Texas Instruments (TI)

This is one company that’s survived over the years by working with clients and expanding its reach to become a truly global enterprise.

The product range has expanded with changes in technology and reduced in physical size, the original LAN cards installed in a rack are now chips in a ruggedized box. Broadband RF/IF & Digital Radio covers a wide range of operating frequencies and an equally wide range of modulation techniques. Product analysis is aided by Application and Design Notes and evaluation boards requiring signal generators, oscilloscopes and multi-meters to measure inputs and outputs.

Space and Satellite products have further expanded the products offered and required strict testing to meet both Hi-rel and radiation requirements of going on Space Missions that last years and with communications and control systems to enable controlled experiments and with the results sent back to the base station for analysis.

With the hardware in many applications getting smaller the chips produced by Texas Instruments are doing more with less power and Tablets being a good example of this. This in turn has led the wafer materials to change from just silicon to using mixed special alloys and aiming to benefit from the characteristics of each type. Other developments in this area cover Nano-technologies which enable complete systems to be produced that run for set times and then analysis is performed to check on the success or failure of design.

Since TI products are used in many different applications Start-ups and Spin-offs must occur all the time when Engineers and Programmers can see other products and services that they can produce and offer to other businesses. This must be one of the benefits of having a company like TI with huge product development programmes and ideas being exchanged with client companies all the time. There is also a drive to simplify product design and gain more reliable designs with less to go wrong.

TI has been around since 1951 and therefore seen its products go from thermionic valves to transistors to integrated circuits to nano-technology. Thermionic valves and transistors have gone solid-state are used in RF and Power Supply circuits and use heat sinks for cooling. Another slower technology change was using integrated circuits in cars and train toilet door locks, due to the chips not coming through military development and therefore missing out on Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) screening. Robots are another product that needed chips to be screened to comply with EMC standards and to have them work correctly and not throw parts about or drop them.

TIs base of engineers must be the reason why it has survived so many changes in technology, when other organisations stop manufacturing and it has moved well with these changes