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by cwal37 362 days ago
They’ve steadily expanded over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was real. It’s not just calculators, TI chips show up in a lot of military hardware in particular.
3 comments

There are a lot of markets where TI is king, such as in battery management ICs.
They make really good VCO+PLL chips. Ultra low phase noise.
DSPs as well
which generally cost pennies.
Which is why they are not planning to make cutting edge semiconductors in the new plant but "foundational semiconductors" aka old nodes that now cost pennies
These have super low profit margins.
They apparently make enough money for TI to have continued investing, over many years, in R&D and manufacturing of those devices.
Not really?

The r&d isn't expensive because these are legacy/old type chips. There isn't much r&d happening. They're made using old processes.

Any r&d is likely using different materials. Military stuff often uses different materials for specific applications.

The profits come from raising yields, which is much easier on older nodes.

US military may be willing to pay more for chips made in the US
If you want to build a fleet of infantry drones and you want to source components from the US there’s a lot of these and many others to buy. Not sure if there’s $60B of them there but they’ll figure out how to waste this much I’m sure.
Well if you look at how Feds has being pumping money into Musk's bank account and what brought down the SVB, then $60B may not be that much. At this point as the country that can prints/(adjust db ledger) $60B is nothing.
I just want them to make a newer version of the TI-99/4A.
Wouldn't it be funny to see that CPU produced on a modern node?

Given the low transistor count, you could probably achieve speeds in the multi-10s of GHz, it would be so small.

A multi-core 99/4A would be hilarious to witness.

With MESI cache coherence, maybe you could migrate the whole workspace for your subroutine into a line of your core's L1D cache, and make it perform like hardware registers while retaining the pleasantly parsimonious TMS 990 architectural semantics?
It's 1/3rd the valuation of the company... its not real lol