By Shelley Kofler, KERA News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-863143.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Texas Instruments today announced it is hiring 250 workers to begin a new chip manufacturing operation in Richardson. KERA's Shelley Kofler has more on T-I's optimistic move in this dismal economy.
When Texas Instruments finished building the sprawling, million-square-foot chip plant three years ago the economy was already tanking. So T-I left the building empty, increased an emphasis on analog technology and waited.
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When a Virginia wafer manufacturer recently went bankrupt T-I bought its equipment for pennies on the dollar.
Then despite layoffs and cutbacks at other companies, T-I with Chairman Rich Templeton decided the time was right for this expansion.
Templeton: Whenever everyone else is hunkering down and being careful we started viewing this as a wonderful time to think about expanding and bringing the Richardson wafer fab online. If you wait for the upturn to be upon you it is too late to take advantage of it.
T-I originally talked about building advanced digital chips at the Richardson plant. Instead it will be the first to produce 300 mm silicon wafers. Because the wafers will be one and a half times bigger than more commonly used wafers they can be divided into more analog chips which radically reduces the cost of manufacturing.
And if producing analog sounds like jumpstarting your grandma's Buick in an age when everything seems digital, here's a quick lesson in semiconductors.
Professor Kenneth O of the University of Texas at Dallas is director of the Texas Analog Center of Excellence. He says analog chips are what make digital applications practical. They are in everything from your refrigerator to your computer.
Prof. O: When you open up any electronic system you find analog.
If you think about the digital it is the thing you use for computation, for storing the data and processing the information. Anything we touch is analog. Anything we see anything we hear that is all analog. We need the analog circuits to take that information that is analog and then convert it into a digital signal so that now we can connect it into the internet and computers and do all the things we do with the computers.
T-I expects to eventually produce $1 billion dollars worth of chips at the Richardson plant. Hiring begins immediately with plans for the first chips to reach customers by the end of next year.