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

In January 1989, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Texas Instruments (TI) a contract to develop the wafer fab of the future.  TI’s goal was to make the production of small batches of wafers economical.  TI teamed leading-edge machinery and production techniques with a computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system to oversee the entire wafer production process. 

Cincom Smalltalk was chosen to develop the prototype for the application. Smalltalk enabled TI to develop the first fully integrated prototype of the CIM system in just six months, including the time spent training programmers to use Smalltalk.  By exploiting VisualWorks’ portability, TI offered customers the flexibility of picking and choosing their preferred combination of platforms and was able to reduce the time to produce silicon wafers from 30 days to three, and the cost from hundreds of millions to $30 million.

Read the Texas Instruments Case Study