Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and one of the most consequential technology firms to emerge from the American South. TI is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume, with a primary focus on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which account for more than 80% of its revenue. From its roots as a small seismic survey firm that set up shop in Dallas in 1930, the company grew to define entire industries — inventing the silicon transistor, the handheld calculator, and the integrated circuit — and in doing so, helped establish the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex as one of the nation's foremost technology corridors. Dallas plays a vital role in the United States' high-tech industry today, but its connection to electronics innovation began nearly a century ago, when a small company that made seismographic tools for the oil industry set roots in the city — an early venture that eventually grew into Texas Instruments.

Origins and Founding

The origins of Texas Instruments can be traced to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where John Clarence Karcher and Eugene B. McDermott, two physicists who had developed a seismographic process useful in oil exploration, started the Geophysical Research Corporation as a subsidiary of Amerada Petroleum in 1924. They moved to Dallas in 1930, started a new independent company, Geophysical Service, Incorporated (GSI), and soon opened another laboratory in New Jersey. Headquartered in Dallas, Geophysical Service used a technique for oil exploration developed by Karcher — reflection seismology — which used underground sound waves to find and map those areas most likely to yield oil.

Eugene McDermott, Cecil H. Green, and J. Erik Jonsson — GSI employees — purchased the company in 1941. In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) 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. At the end of 1952, Texas Instruments announced that it had expanded to 2,000 employees and $17 million in sales. The young company's rapid growth reflected the broader post-war expansion of the American defense and electronics industries, with Dallas serving as an increasingly attractive base for technical manufacturing.

Technological Milestones

Texas Instruments' record of invention during the 1950s and 1960s is remarkable by any measure. In early 1952, TI purchased a patent license to produce germanium transistors from Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, for $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, and Teal's first assignment was to direct TI's research laboratory.

TI produced the world's first commercial silicon transistor in 1954, and the same year designed and manufactured the first transistor radio. These achievements positioned Dallas as an unlikely hub of cutting-edge semiconductor research at a time when the industry was barely a decade old.

The company's most celebrated invention came a few years later. Just months after the Semiconductor Building opened, employee Jack Kilby unveiled his groundbreaking invention — the integrated circuit, which became a fundamental component of modern semiconductors used in all electronics. Revolutionizing the miniaturization of electronics, Kilby won a Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, and the National Medal of Technology. The integrated circuit, conceived and developed on the Dallas campus in 1958, is broadly considered one of the most transformative inventions of the twentieth century.

In 1966, Patrick Haggerty was elected chairman of TI's board after J. Erik Jonsson left to become mayor of Dallas. He challenged a team of engineers to develop a new product — the portable, pocket-sized calculator — to demonstrate that integrated circuits had a place in the consumer market. In 1967, TI engineers invented a prototype hand-held calculator, which weighed 45 ounces. It was four years before the hand-held calculator hit the stores, but once it did it made history.

In 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device (also known as the DLP chip), 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, which allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions. After the acquisition of National Semiconductor in 2011, the company held a combined portfolio of 45,000 analog products and customer design tools.

The Dallas Campus and Architecture

One of the most distinctive chapters in TI's Dallas story is the design and construction of its corporate headquarters campus. In 1955, Texas Instruments purchased 250 acres bordering both Dallas and Richardson, Texas, for a corporate campus. The site was traversed by a creek and contained groves of oak trees and gently rolling topography.

The architecture firm of O'Neil Ford and Richard Colley won a limited competition for the first structure on the site, the Semiconductor Building. Collaborating with Dallas landscape architects Arthur and Marie Berger, their scheme carefully integrated the corporate headquarters with the landscape. Open courtyards containing native oaks were nestled into the buildings, providing natural light, contact with nature, and multiple points of orientation. Deep colonnades allowed employees to move from building to building, shaded from the hot Texas sun.

In 1958, Texan architects O'Neil Ford with Richard Colley, Arch Swank, and Sam Zisman conceived of the massive complex, which typified Ford's daring creativity and stands as what has been considered the most technologically innovative design of his career. The Semiconductor Building serves as a larger artifact of twentieth-century technology, showcasing both advancements in concrete structural design and pioneering breakthroughs in the field of digital electronics.

TI CEO Patrick Haggerty achieved his goal of creating a collegial work environment in an artful way to raise the spirits of everyone who enters the space. The campus design philosophy — blending natural landscape features with modernist architecture — set a standard for corporate facilities in the region and has been studied as an exemplary model of mid-century American industrial design.

Today, Texas Instruments' corporate headquarters is located at 12500 TI Blvd, Dallas. This facility serves as the central hub for the company's global operations and is the primary office for its executive leadership and core corporate functions.

Impact on Dallas and the DFW Region

Texas Instruments' presence in Dallas has extended well beyond its own payroll and product lines. The company's founders took an active role in shaping the city's civic and educational institutions in ways that continue to reverberate today.

Before The University of Texas at Dallas existed, three of Texas Instruments' founders — Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, and Cecil Green — established the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. This center for higher education evolved into UT Dallas in 1969, and the ties between Texas Instruments and UT Dallas have remained strong ever since.

Throughout UT Dallas' history, Texas Instruments has served as a crucial partner in establishing UT Dallas as an institution focused on innovative research. Their contributions include a $332,400 grant in 2008 from the TI Foundation to create a TI Science and Technology Innovation Fund, a nearly $1.15 million gift to support semiconductor research in 2009, a $250,000 gift to support the Texas Biomedical Device Center in 2014 from the Texas Instruments Alumni Association, and the creation of the Texas Instruments Innovation Lab in 2015.

A $2.1 million grant from the TI Foundation in 2018 enabled UT Dallas students to participate in the Texas Instruments Founders Leadership Fellows program, a yearlong internship designed to help grow the pipeline of nonprofit professionals in the Dallas area. Texas Instruments also announced a $5 million gift to create an endowment supporting early career faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering within the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

The company's archival record itself has become a cultural asset for the city. Through longtime president J. Erik Jonsson, TI was deeply involved with the city of Dallas, and the archives of Texas Instruments — an immense resource stretching back to its origins — are housed at DeGolyer Library at SMU, allowing the university to preserve a unique part of the city's history. The Texas Instruments Records contain corporate records, photos, and artifacts that tell the story of a major technology enterprise.

As SMU archivist Ben Jenkins has noted, "With deep Dallas roots, TI has propelled the city and the DFW Metroplex as a whole to the forefront of technological development."

TI Today

Texas Instruments is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol TXN, and is led by chairman, president, and CEO Haviv Ilan. The company produces tens of billions of chips every year and employs approximately 34,000 people worldwide, with around 14,000 in the Americas, 18,000 in Asia-Pacific, and 2,000 in Europe. TI offers more than 80,000 products and serves over 100,000 customers.

TI designs, manufactures, and sells analog and embedded processing chips for markets such as industrial, automotive, personal electronics, communications equipment, and enterprise systems. 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.

TI has a long history of globally owned, regionally diverse internal manufacturing operations, including wafer fabs, assembly and test factories, and bump and probe facilities across 15 worldwide sites. Despite this global reach, Dallas remains the nerve center of TI's strategy, innovation, and executive decision-making — a relationship between a city and a company that has endured for nearly a century.