TI to sink $2 billion into DSP R&D; and production

17 Jun 2002

Texas Instruments said it will invest $2 billion--the largest single investment ever--to develop and manufacture new digital signal processing components. The bulk of the investment, approximately $1.6 billion, will be for a new fab facility in Dallas. Much of the remaining $400 million will be for an R&D; center to develop new semiconductor manufacturing processes at 0.18 micron, and eventually at 0.12 micron, for future generations of DSP-based systems on a chip.

The moves come amid intensifying competition in the DSP business and such high-growth applications for DSPs as two-way pagers, full-feature phones and telephone answering devices, set-top boxes, tape backup drives, color scanners, modems and digital cameras that are likely to use a DSP rather than the conventional microcontroller device. To remain be competitive in the exploding DSP arena, competitors Motorola, Analog Devices and Zilog, among others, are also investing in new fab capacity for new technology.

Future DSP-based chips must shrink to achieve the higher integration, higher speeds and lower power consumption, said Ashwin Shah, TI's director of the semiconductor process and device center, though he declined to specify what DSP products would be built in the new facility. Volume production is expected to begin by the end of 1997.