Texas Instruments, Inc.

Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI)

U.S. manufacturer of calculators, microprocessors, and digital signal processors. The direct antecedent to the company, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, was founded by John Karcher and Eugene McDermott in 1930 to provide seismographic data for the petroleum industry. In 1958 Jack Kilby, a researcher at TI, coinvented the integrated circuit (IC), and in 1967 he invented the basic design for handheld calculators. In 1973 TI began to manufacture dynamic random-access memory (DRAM, commonly shortened to RAM) chips for use in computers, and in 1982 it introduced the single-chip digital signal processor (DSP), which it employs in cell phones, Global Postioning System (GPS) receivers, and adapters for computer networks.