Vendor lineage
Texas Instruments - where the integrated circuit was demonstrated
Semiconductor company whose employee demonstrated the first integrated circuit in 1958.
Texas Instruments began as a company doing seismic survey work for the oil industry and took its present name in 1951. In 1958 one of its engineers, Jack Kilby, demonstrated that several components could be built on a single piece of semiconductor - the integrated circuit.
That demonstration is a milestone on this site rather than a line in this entry, and the milestone records the qualification honestly: Kilby showed it could be done and Noyce’s planar approach at Fairchild is what made it manufacturable. Both are credited, and the distinction between proving a thing possible and making it repeatable is the whole difference between a laboratory and an industry.
The company since is less visible and more pervasive than its origin suggests. Its business is largely analogue and embedded silicon - power management, signal conditioning, interface, the small parts that are never listed on a datasheet summary and without which nothing else on the board functions.
It also appears elsewhere on this timeline as somebody who lost a market. The Marvell entry records that a digital read channel built in CMOS took Texas Instruments out of the disk-drive read-channel business, which is a reminder that a company can invent the foundational technology of an industry and still be displaced inside it.
- Texas Instruments (Wikipedia): American semiconductor company, its origins in Geophysical Service Incorporated, renamed Texas Instruments in 1951; employer of Jack Kilby, who demonstrated the integrated circuit in 1958
- Integrated circuit (Wikipedia): Kilby’s 1958 demonstration at Texas Instruments, alongside Noyce’s planar work at Fairchild