TI’s predecessor company, Geophysical Service Inc., commercializes seismic signal processing, revolutionizing oil and gas exploration.

The company is soon operating in oil fields around the world.

GSI expands the application of signal processing to submarine detection, then radar, leading to formation of a unit in 1946 to focus on electronic equipment.

Now called Texas Instruments, the company enters the semiconductor industry, designing and manufacturing the day’s latest electronic signal-processing components, germanium transistors.

In 1954 a TI team led by Gordon Teal invents the silicon transistor, establishing TI as a leader in the young industry.

TI engineer Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit, combining several signal-processing components on a silicon chip.

The historic leap leads to decades of technology development, producing ever faster, smaller and more powerful TI chips, which appear in everything from hearing aids to interplanetary spacecraft.

TI introduces the first single-chip microcontroller, which combines all the elements of computing on one piece of silicon.

Rapidly put to use in appliances, other consumer electronics and industrial equipment, the TMS1000 spawned the workhorse embedded processors that now permeate electronics.

With its first commercial single-chip digital signal processor, or DSP, TI produces a microprocessor optimized for high-speed digital signal processing.

Building on the success of the 1978 DSP-based educational toy Speak & Spell, DSPs prove to be a key enabling technology for virtually all digital multimedia and wireless technologies.

TI sharpens its focus on wireless and Internet technology, producing DSPs for cellular base stations, high-speed modems and the first multimedia cell phones.

TI expands its emphasis on both analog semiconductors and embedded processors – technologies that expand our digital interactions with the world, enhance electronics’ intelligence and permeate multimedia applications in particular.

TI lays the groundwork for next-generation signal-processing technology, exploring promising areas such as graphene and carbon nanotubes in its R&D labs and in collaboration with industry consortia and leading universities worldwide.