Texas Instruments Inc.
Semiconductors & Electronic ComponentsFounded 1951- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
Texas Instruments Inc.
Company History
Founded 1951 in Dallas, Texas
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Geophysics Service Incorporated, a Texas oil-field services company founded in 1930, spun out its electronics division as Texas Instruments in 1951. The electronics division had been building seismic data processing equipment during World War II, and by 1951 its management believed the commercial opportunity in transistors was larger than the opportunity in petroleum exploration instruments.
The transistor license they acquired from Western Electric in 1952 for $25,000 changed the trajectory of the company more than any single decision before or since. Jack Kilby arrived at TI in 1958 as a new hire with no accumulated vacation time — which meant he was working in the lab while most of the staff was on summer break. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated an integrated circuit built from a small sliver of germanium. Most of the people who would have seen it were not there that day. The Nobel Prize in Physics arrived 42 years later, in 2000.
TI commercialized the first silicon transistor in 1954 and the first handheld electronic calculator in 1972. The calculator business led the company into consumer electronics, a market that proved more difficult than TI's management expected. The TI-99/4A home computer launched in the early 1980s as a direct competitor to the Commodore 64 and Apple II. TI lost approximately $660 million on the platform before exiting the consumer PC market in 1983 — a failure large enough to reshape the company's strategic priorities for the next four decades.
The exit from consumer electronics was not framed as a retreat at the time, but it functioned as one. TI's subsequent decades were defined by a systematic withdrawal from markets where consumer preference and fashion risk determined outcomes, and a movement toward industrial and automotive markets where reliability specifications and long qualification cycles created stable, predictable customer relationships.
Patrick E. Haggerty served as president and later chairman of Texas Instruments from 1951 to 1976 and is widely credited as the primary architect of TI's transformation from a seismic exploration instrumentation company into a global semiconductor powerhouse. His decision in 1952 to license transistor technology from Western Electric, his recruitment of Gordon Teal from Bell Labs to develop silicon transistors, and his strategic push to commercialize the transistor in consumer products—most notably through the 1954 transistor radio initiative—established TI's early competitive position in an industry that did not yet fully exist. Haggerty's vision of what he called the 'creative matrix'—an organizational structure that simultaneously pursued near-term commercial objectives and long-horizon research—predated modern concepts of ambidextrous organization management by decades. He was a founding trustee of what would become the University of Texas at Dallas and played a pivotal role in establishing the research infrastructure of the Dallas technology corridor. He died in 1980, having built the company from a small seismograph instrument maker into one of the most important technology companies in the world.
Cecil H. Green served as a director of Texas Instruments from its founding until his retirement from active corporate involvement in the 1970s and made essential contributions to the company's financial management and international expansion. His longest-lasting legacy, however, is philanthropic: the Green family donated more than 200 million dollars to educational and scientific institutions over their lifetimes, establishing the University of Texas at Dallas as a research university—a transformation that ultimately seeded the Dallas technology ecosystem from which TI continues to draw engineering talent. Green was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 for his services to education and died in 2003 at the age of 102.
Texas Instruments Incorporated was formally established as an independent entity in 1951 by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty, growing out of the electronics manufacturing operations of Geophysics Service Incorporated. The new company was incorporated in Delaware and began operations focused on defense electronics and early transistor development.
TI acquired a license from Western Electric—AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary—to produce transistors based on Bell Laboratories' technology for a fee of 25,000 dollars. The license gave TI the intellectual property foundation it needed to enter the semiconductor manufacturing business and was one of the most consequential technology licensing transactions in the history of the electronics industry.
TI engineer Gordon Teal announced the world's first commercial silicon transistor at the Institute of Radio Engineers convention, shocking competitors who had not believed silicon transistors were manufacturable at commercial volumes. The silicon transistor's ability to operate at much higher temperatures than germanium transistors made it far more suitable for military and industrial applications, giving TI an immediate competitive advantage.
On September 12, 1958, TI engineer Jack Kilby demonstrated the world's first working integrated circuit, a small piece of germanium containing a transistor, capacitor, and resistors connected by metal wire on a single substrate. The demonstration solved the 'tyranny of numbers' problem that had limited electronic system complexity and laid the conceptual foundation for the microprocessor, the personal computer, the smartphone, and every major digital technology that followed.
TI introduced the Datamath, the world's first commercial handheld electronic calculator powered by a single integrated circuit chip that TI designed and manufactured. The Datamath sold for 149.95 dollars at introduction and demonstrated TI's ability to commercialize its semiconductor technology in consumer products, though aggressive price competition in the calculator market would eventually erode margins industry-wide.
TI introduced the TMS9900, the world's first commercially available single-chip 16-bit microprocessor. The TMS9900 was used as the CPU of the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A home computers and demonstrated TI's leading position in microprocessor design, though the company's home computer venture ultimately proved commercially unsuccessful.
Texas Instruments announced the discontinuation of the TI-99/4A home computer following losses estimated at approximately 660 million dollars from its consumer PC business. The withdrawal marked a significant strategic inflection point for TI, reinforcing institutional caution about consumer-facing hardware markets and redirecting organizational focus toward semiconductor components for industrial and commercial customers.
TI commercially launched Digital Light Processing technology based on the Digital Micromirror Device chip invented by engineer Larry Hornbeck in 1987. DLP technology went on to power hundreds of millions of projectors, digital cinema screens, and televisions globally, and Hornbeck's invention is today recognized as one of the landmark achievements in MEMS semiconductor history.
TI completed the acquisition of National Semiconductor Corporation for approximately 6.5 billion dollars in cash, adding National's extensive analog product portfolio—particularly in power management and audio amplifiers—to TI's catalog. The acquisition made TI the undisputed leader in analog semiconductors by revenue and added manufacturing facilities and customer relationships that significantly expanded TI's market reach.
Texas Instruments formally exited the mobile application processor market, discontinuing development of its OMAP processor line that had powered smartphones and tablets from Nokia, Motorola, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. The exit freed approximately 1 billion dollars per year in research and development spending and redirected TI's engineering resources toward the industrial and automotive analog markets that management viewed as more defensible and more aligned with TI's manufacturing strengths.
TI announced plans to construct new 300-millimeter semiconductor fabrication facilities in Sherman, Texas, and to expand its Lehi, Utah facility acquired from Micron Technology. The planned investment of approximately 30 billion dollars over the following decade represented one of the largest single-company semiconductor manufacturing investments in US history and was subsequently supported by CHIPS and Science Act investment tax credits.
Haviv Ilan assumed the role of President and Chief Executive Officer of Texas Instruments, succeeding Rich Templeton who had served as CEO since 2004. Ilan, who had served in senior executive roles at TI since 2009 including as President and Chief Operating Officer, continued the company's strategic focus on analog and embedded processing markets and its manufacturing investment program during the semiconductor industry down-cycle.
TI acquired Burr-Brown, an Arizona-based analog and mixed-signal semiconductor company, for approximately 7.6 billion dollars in an all-stock transaction in 2000. Burr-Brown was among the most respected precision analog semiconductor designers in the world, with particular strength in high-resolution data converters, audio digital-to-analog converters, operational amplifiers, and instrumentation amplifiers used in test and measurement, medical, and industrial applications. The acquisition was intended to strengthen TI's analog portfolio at a time when the company was establishing its leadership in analog semiconductors as a strategic priority.
TI acquired National Semiconductor, the Santa Clara-based analog semiconductor pioneer, for approximately 6.5 billion dollars in cash in 2011, in what was at the time the largest semiconductor acquisition TI had ever executed. National Semiconductor had been one of the founding companies of the Silicon Valley semiconductor industry, and its product portfolio—particularly in power management, audio amplifiers, display drivers, and interface circuits—was complementary to but minimally overlapping with TI's existing analog catalog. The acquisition was explicitly motivated by TI's strategy to achieve leadership in the analog semiconductor market by product count, manufacturing scale, and customer reach.
Texas Instruments acquired Micron Technology's 300-millimeter semiconductor fabrication facility in Lehi, Utah, for approximately 900 million dollars in 2021. The Lehi facility, which Micron had been operating for NAND flash memory production, was purchased by TI as a ready-made 300-millimeter manufacturing shell that could be converted to analog semiconductor production at significantly lower cost and faster timeline than constructing a new greenfield facility. The acquisition was a key element of TI's strategy to rapidly expand its 300-millimeter analog manufacturing capacity in the United States.
TI acquired Unitrode Corporation, a Massachusetts-based power management semiconductor company, for approximately 2.5 billion dollars in 2000. Unitrode was a highly regarded specialist in power supply control integrated circuits, battery charger ICs, and power management components used in servers, telecom equipment, and portable electronics—product categories where TI had limited presence at the time of the acquisition. The deal was part of TI's late-1990s and early-2000s strategy of acquiring analog specialists to rapidly build the power management portfolio depth needed to compete effectively in the fast-growing semiconductor power management market.
Texas Instruments Incorporated was founded on December 6, 1951 in Dallas, Texas, but the company traces its operating heritage to Geophysical Service Inc., established in 1930 in Newark, New Jersey by John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott to provide seismic exploration services for the oil and gas industry. In 1941, McDermott led an executive buyout of GSI from its parent and moved operations to Dallas. During World War II, GSI developed expertise in electronics for submarine detection and other defense applications. After the war, the electronics work outgrew the geophysical exploration business, and in 1951 the company was reorganized as Texas Instruments, with the geophysical business retained as a subsidiary. The four key figures behind the 1951 transition were Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty, all of whom became central to TI's identity. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson are typically described as the founders together with Haggerty, who joined later but drove the strategic shift into semiconductors. The Dallas headquarters has remained the corporate center ever since, and TI grew to become one of the world's most important semiconductor companies.
Jack Kilby joined Texas Instruments in May 1958 as a newly hired engineer and within months invented the integrated circuit, one of the foundational inventions of the modern electronics industry. Kilby, who had previously worked at Centralab in Milwaukee, joined TI specifically because the company would let him work on miniaturization of electronic components. In the summer of 1958, while many TI engineers were on vacation, Kilby developed the idea that resistors, capacitors, transistors, and other circuit elements could be fabricated on a single piece of semiconductor material. He demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958 using a slab of germanium with embedded components. TI filed a patent on the design in February 1959. Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor developed a parallel monolithic silicon integrated circuit shortly afterward, and Kilby and Noyce are jointly credited with the invention. Kilby went on to develop the first handheld electronic calculator at TI in 1967, which contributed to the company's later calculator dominance. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for the integrated circuit invention. Kilby died in 2005, and his work remains foundational to all modern semiconductor electronics.
Texas Instruments became a dominant force in handheld calculators through the 1970s and 1980s, leveraging Jack Kilby's 1967 invention of the prototype electronic calculator and the company's vertical integration in integrated circuit manufacturing. TI launched the TI-2500 Datamath consumer calculator in 1972, and through the 1970s the company built a leading position in both consumer and scientific calculators. The TI graphing calculator series, including the TI-81 launched in 1990 and the TI-83 launched in 1996, became standard in US high school and college mathematics classes and remained the dominant educational graphing calculator for decades. TI also entered home computers with the TI-99/4A in 1979, but the home computer business proved unprofitable and was discontinued in 1983 with a major write-down. TI exited the consumer calculator business broadly in 1997 to focus on the educational and professional segments, although the TI-84 and successor graphing calculators continue to be sold into education markets. The calculator legacy contributed to TI's brand recognition even as the broader corporate strategy shifted away from consumer products toward analog semiconductors and embedded processing.
Texas Instruments evolved from a diversified electronics company into a focused semiconductor pure-play through a long sequence of business divestitures and strategic refocusing. TI's defense electronics business, a major segment dating to World War II work, was sold to Raytheon in 1997 for approximately $2.95 billion. The company's notebook PC business was sold to Acer in 1997. The seismic exploration business that had been the company's original Geophysical Service Inc. heritage was eventually divested. The consumer calculator business was largely exited in 1997, with educational calculators retained. The 1996 spin-off of the embedded printer controller business and other consumer-related divestitures continued the refocusing. The 2011 acquisition of National Semiconductor for approximately $6.5 billion strengthened the analog semiconductor business. The 2012 and 2013 decisions to exit wireless and mobile-applications processors used in smartphones simplified the portfolio further, refocusing on industrial and automotive analog and embedded processing. By the mid 2010s TI had become a pure-play semiconductor company with analog products generating roughly 75 percent or more of revenue and embedded processing supplying most of the balance, exiting consumer-driven volatile segments.
Texas Instruments Incorporated is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, at a campus on North Central Expressway that has been the corporate center since the company's founding in 1951. The company employs approximately 34,000 people globally and operates manufacturing, design, and sales sites across the United States, Mexico, Asia, and Europe. Major manufacturing facilities include 300mm wafer fabs at the LFAB facility in Lehi, Utah acquired from Micron in 2021, the SM1 and SM2 fabs at the Sherman, Texas site that began construction in 2022, and existing fabs in Richardson, Texas, plus 200mm fabs in Aizu, Japan and elsewhere. Assembly and test facilities are concentrated in Asia including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan, plus Mexico. Design centers are located across the United States, India, Germany, and other markets. Revenue in fiscal year 2024 was approximately $15.64 billion, down from a peak of approximately $20 billion in 2022 as the industrial cycle softened. Market capitalization is around $155 billion, making TI one of the largest US semiconductor companies and a major constituent of the S&P 500. The company is a beneficiary of the CHIPS and Science Act funding for domestic semiconductor manufacturing.