Texas Instruments

"The second category was obscure small companies that wanted to make a great achievement by using the transistor as a “technological turning point.” There were quite a few such companies; the most successful later was Texas Instruments."

"Sylvania hired me because they wanted to make use of my mechanical expertise to automate the production line. So, as soon as I joined the company, I was assigned to work on a germanium transistor production line. Germanium and silicon are both raw materials for transistors. Because germanium can be processed at lower temperatures, it was adopted first. In 1955, except for Texas Instruments, which had already mass-produced silicon transistors, everyone used germanium. Texas Instruments’ masterstroke of achieving great results with small means was that, in 1954, it took the lead in developing the silicon transistor. Aside from TI, other companies were still in the experimental stage regarding silicon transistors; Sylvania was even further behind, and did not begin experimenting with silicon transistors until a year after I joined the company."

"At that time, Texas Instruments was still a very small company, and when it applied to Bell Labs for a license for transistor technology, it was mocked quite a bit. But its president, Patrick Haggerty, was an extremely ambitious person with strategic vision. Not long after obtaining the license, Haggerty poached a Dr. Teal from Bell Labs. Teal was a significant contributor within the transistor invention team. When he left Bell for TI, everyone at Bell found it astonishing. Bell was the world’s most famous research institution, while TI was an insignificant little company. Moreover, at the time, Texas gave people the impression of nothing but cowboys and oil—no high level of culture, let alone advanced technology."

"After Teal arrived at TI, he focused on research and development of silicon. At an academic semiconductor conference in May 1954, Teal presented a paper titled “Recent Developments in Silicon.” Such conferences did not require authors to submit manuscripts in advance, so before the presentations, no one could know what Teal was going to say. At the same conference, there were several papers about silicon development. In a paper before Teal’s, on the development of silicon transistors, the author was a semiconductor research director at a large company. He said with confidence that silicon technology was advancing quickly, but that to use it to manufacture transistors would still require at least two or three more years. After he finished, Teal went on stage. Calm and unhurried, he described some experimental results, and among the audience there were still quite a few people dozing off. Finally, when he finished reading the paper, Teal raised his head and, in his Texas accent, slowly said: “We have successfully manufactured silicon transistors, whose performance matches what experiments predicted. TI is in pilot production, and we expect that in a few months we will be able to mass-produce them and bring them to market.”"

"And what a vigorous company Texas Instruments was! Employees seemed to walk a bit faster than at Sylvania, and their backs seemed a bit straighter too. “Tired” was practically an adjective you never heard. At that time, the standard workweek in the United States was forty hours, but TI’s working hours were at least fifty; it was common for someone to bring a canvas cot to work in the morning, planning to sleep in the office at night. Working on Saturday mornings was an unwritten rule, and except for the most junior employees, no one received overtime pay for extended hours. I also discovered that within the company, “failure” was never accepted; “setbacks” could be understood, even sympathized with. But the person who suffered a setback had to pull themselves together and start again; if there was another setback, start again—until success. I also found that this was a very talkative company, where no one was afraid to voice opinions, even if some were very naive. In my first few months on the job, several times the production line’s yield suddenly dropped or failed to rise as expected; not only engineers and technicians, but even line operators would offer suggestions—and do so enthusiastically. Their suggestions were not necessarily adopted, but even after repeatedly hitting a wall, they would still continue to express their views."

"Just as the literary giant Hemingway described Paris as “a moveable feast,” I describe my year at Harvard the same way. After that, I went through various stages—MIT, employment, entering Stanford for a Ph.D., and working at Texas Instruments—but no matter where I went or what I did, I carried this “feast” with me and continually enjoyed the knowledge, interests, and insights that this “feast” gave me. Even decades later, when I returned to Taiwan, although changes in time and place made it feel as if I were in another world, this “feast” still did not lose its freshness. It was as though I were still immersed in a rich, ever-changing, refined, and captivating atmosphere."

"What a young company Texas Instruments was! The people I saw all around seemed to be under forty. My supervisor was a somewhat older department manager, but he was not yet forty either, and other managers at the same level seemed even younger than he was; the general manager of the semiconductor division, Mark Shepherd, was only thirty-six. At Sylvania, of course there were young engineers of my generation, but the age of most people in the supervisory ranks was over forty. People in their fifties, even their sixties, were not uncommon."

"The dotcom crisis reshaped tech manufacturing for years to come. In the prior decade, leading contract manufacturers had begun to purchase factories from major brands including IBM, Texas Instruments, Ericsson, Siemens, and Lucent. The deals were often seen as a win-win, with the big brands saving on costs. Negative media headlines could be avoided, since factories were not being shuttered so much as being put under new management. When Apple sold its Fountain, Colorado, factory in 1996, most of its 1,100 employees simply got a new uniform. But the result was a huge transfer in practical knowledge from the computer brands to the contract manufacturers."