Texas Instruments Inc executive vice-president of the Semiconductor Group, Wally Rhines, is currently in Tokyo as part of the company’s Globalisation of management efforts which involve a three-month rotation of executives through major markets to increase awareness of customer needs. Texas Instruments has been in Japan 25 years, has around $1,000m in Japan-based revenues and – in direct contrast to Intel Corp – is a significant manufacturing presence, with four plants employing 3,500 in manufacturing plus another 2,000 in sales and administrative jobs. Rhines sees the current semiconductor industry as being in turmoil, as the impetus in the industry moves from the vertically-integrated companies to functionally-defined companies – Japan being an exception to the rule however; and the purchasing power of vendors such as Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Computer Corp and Apple Computer Inc for example, causing major growth in the merchant market. Another trend is the move from custom chips to standard chips: Texas focuses on getting its standard chip designs into ASIC libraries which are then available for derivatives. He also sees the growth of digital signal processor market with increased demand for modems, disk drives, speech-driven devices and portable phones as well as in other telecommunications products such as switches. A particular attraction in Japan for Texas Instruments is the use of signal processors in large-volume products such as karaoke players. Texas is doing increasing and profitable business where it keeps a certain percentage of its dynamic memory chip production uncommitted until the last 90 days prior to release in order to fulfill the requirements of customers that are sole source commitments and fab-less IC companies. Rhines expects the Japanese consumer market to strengthen later this year, thus benefitting Texas, and he also expects more political pressure for increased market access. Regarding the possible replacement of Texas by Fujitsu Ltd as Sun Microsystems Inc’s manufacturing partner for the MicroSparc, Rhines said Fujitsu (a good customer of Texas’s) also need their place in the Sun. He predicted that the Sparc market could only benefit from the presence of a set of viable suppliers of Sparc chips LSI Logic Corp and Cypress Semiconductor Corp having demonstrated less of a clear roadmap for the future. Expressing an opinion about the coming Windows NT-on-Pentium versus Unix-on-RISC war, Rhines thought that the Pentium, coming in with lower performance, still in pre-production volumes two years later than RISC processors, could never hope to catch up with RISC. It was remarkable that the engineering and scientific market always got their way he said – the split between RISC for engineering and Intel Corp iAPX-86 for business applications would continue in the 1990s. – Anita Byrnes
