Case Study: Texas Instruments achieves 10x faster wafer production and $30M fab cost target with Cincom VisualWorks

Cincom Smalltalk Helps Texas Instruments Meet Defense Department Cost and Time-To-Market Requirements

Texas Instruments was contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a next-generation wafer fab that would slash capital costs (from hundreds of millions to $30 million) and reduce wafer cycle time from 30 days to three, while making small-batch production economical and commercially available. The challenge was to build a flexible, maintainable Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system that supported client-server computing, customizable graphical user interfaces, and rapid incorporation of new features to meet varied customer needs.

TI chose an object-oriented approach using Cincom Smalltalk/VisualWorks to prototype and build the CIM system. The team delivered the first fully integrated prototype in six months (including training), reused up to 80% of the code (another 10% with minimal changes), met the Defense Department’s goals, improved responsiveness to customer requests, and released the production system (WORKS) to support portable, customizable GUIs and faster feature development.

Texas Instruments