Texas Instrument IT Strategy

Texas Instruments IT strategy is one that incorporates innovation in not only product design, but more importantly manufacturing. Tl's major contribution to technology is the semiconductor. They are currently the third largest maker and supplier of semiconductors in the world. Texas Instruments is also the number one maker and supplier for digital sound processors (DSP) in the world. TI is also the leader in DLP technology, which consists of micro-mirror components, a technology used in video projectors and televisions as well as movie theatres or cinemas that delivers high def quality. TI's main revenue producing technology is the semiconductor industry. From these semiconductors TI is able to allow manufacturers to create several different products. One popular product that is a result of a TI semiconductor is the cellular phone. Some other products include calculators, RFID systems, digital consumer devices, broadband communication systems and other PC peripherals.
The manufacturing and development strategy at TI is somewhat a complex system, however it is because of this complex system or strategy that is what makes TI strong today and will make TI even more prevalent in the future. In January 2007, TI announced a shift in its internal technology development to take advantage of its foundry partners’ R&D capabilities. With foundries now supplying more than half of TI’s digital CMOS capacity during the peak periods of the demand cycle, the regular exchange of process technology information at the 130-nm, 90-nm and 65-nm nodes made it clear that there was no longer a significant gap between the foundries’ development and our own. Now the processes that the foundries develop for TI will be the starting point for TI’s own internal production.
As a result, starting at the 32-nm node TI will collaborate closely with the foundries to develop processes that specifically address our products’ requirements and our customers’ needs. The resulting digital CMOS development wafers will run in the foundries’ clean rooms instead of our own. Later, when the process is ready to transition to production, wafers will be produced both in TI’s factories and at the foundries. This flexible model for silicon technology development allows TI significant opportunity to tailor the process technology to the specific needs of our customers. TI also remains
focused on being first in its markets to ramp products to volume production at each node. As one of our foundry partners’ largest customers, TI will receive unique support in addressing our products’ requirements and our customers’ needs. Just as we have always done when transferring products to our foundry partners, we will specify a Process Development Kit (PDK) that outlines in detail the specifications the process must meet or exceed to support our design needs. TI will leverage the digital CMOS technologies developed by our foundry partners to support our highly differentiated design libraries. TI will continue to differentiate its digital CMOS designs in many ways, including, Low-power design, High-density embedded SRAM, Analog and RF integration, Software Development tools, and Signal processing cores.
Texas Instrument is always dedicated to its research and development of products with about $2.2 billion forecast to be spent in 2007 on research and development, TI continues to invest significantly in innovation. These investments touch areas where TI sees opportunity to differentiate for its customers, including intellectual property (IP) at the circuit, system and software level. Advances in packaging and analog process technology are regularly contributing to Tl's competitive position. Here are some of the areas that TI will focus its research and development on: Low Power Management Reducing system power consumption is no longer only a matter of longer battery life or reducing heat dissipation, it's a global environmental concern. TI has committed teams working solely on reducing power consumption at both the chip and system level. SmartReflex™ is the company’s holistic approach combining a number of proprietary TI technologies to dramatically reduce both static and dynamic power throughout an application.
Digital RF technologies, with an eye toward putting mobile communications technology into the hands of more people, including people in third-world countries who may have never made a phone call, TI is leading the way in lowering costs by integrating large portions of wireless systems onto single-chip, high-volume digital CMOS technology. TI’s DRP™ architecture uses sampled data processing techniques to build robust transceivers that require no off-chip intermediate filtering stages or more costly SiGe or BiCMOS RF technologies, dramatically reducing total system cost, bill of materials and power consumption. Also, TI has consistently led the industry in its SRAM memory technology, specifically the size of its memory cell. As applications demand increasing amounts of extremely fast memory on-chip, the amount of chip area dedicated to memory has also grown, increasing manufacturing costs to produce the device. TI's use of 193-nm immersion tools has resulted in the development of what TI believes to be the smallest 45-nm SRAM memory cells in the industry, occupying only 0.24 square microns. That’s up to 30 percent smaller than other 45-nm memory cells devices announced to date.
TI’s Analog Technology: Analog chips connect digital signal processors (DSPs) and other types of logic to the outside world, changing real-world signals such as light and sound into binary pulses and back again. Many analog functions are not optimized for high-speed digital logic integration. In those cases, TI analog product development teams focus on analog-only integration, with optimized components for precision, speed and power. Different TI processes are devoted to the various needs of signal conditioning, data conversion and power supply in customers’ systems.