1 Company in Dallas, Texas

Texas Instruments has a claim few companies can make: it put the first transistor radio in consumers' hands (1954) and the first integrated circuit on the market (1958, thanks to engineer Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel Prize for it). That invention, the chip, launched the digital age — and TI built its fortune on it, becoming one of the world's most enduring semiconductor companies. Today TI is the world's largest maker of analog chips — the thousands of everyday functions like voltage regulation, signal conversion, and power management that sit inside virtually every electronic device — and embedded processors for industrial and automotive use. Its products are boring in the best way: a car contains hundreds of TI chips, and a data center's power supplies depend on them. The company's 300mm wafer fabs in Texas are among the most advanced analog manufacturing facilities on earth. With about 34,000 employees and annual revenue near US$18 billion, TI is famous for its 'no layoffs' culture (a policy it has largely kept for decades) and for manufacturing discipline — it builds most of its own chips, unlike many rivals who outsource. For engineers, TI's datasheets and design tools are the industry's default reference — the company that defined the chip industry's vocabulary.