Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, known for analog chips, embedded processors, calculators and education technology. It emerged in 1951 from the reorganization of Geophysical Service Incorporated, a seismic exploration firm founded in 1930, and was set up by Cecil Green, Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott and Patrick Haggerty. Its engineers produced the first commercial silicon transistor in 1954, and the same year the company designed and made one of the first transistor radios, an early step in putting broadcast listening in a pocket. Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit there in 1958. For the history of the screen it matters chiefly through the digital light processing chip that TI invented in 1987, which became the basis of its DLP technology and of DLP Cinema, a family of digital projection systems used to show films in theaters. The company sold its defense business to Raytheon in 1997 and bought National Semiconductor in 2011.