TI president Tom Engibous did in fact tell financial analysts in March that his company could be larger than Intel within the next five years-a conjecture that boosted TI's stock price more than a few points that day. Whether or not it has any merit depends on changes in the nature of computing. As long as computers are instruction-fetch, instruction-execute machines-Rube Goldberg contraptions that waste a lot of machine cycles trying to figure out where to put data after you've done something to it-then Intel's Pentiums will likely dominate. But if computers become the sort of things that you wear and talk to-packed with speech recognizers, proximity detectors and other touchy-feely devices-they'll use a ton of DSP and mixed-signal processing components.

What TI communicated with its acquisition of Burr-Brown is that it likes being No. 1-that it intends to dominate the semiconductor markets it participates in. With $2.8 billion in 1999 shipments, according to Dataquest estimates, TI is the world's largest supplier of analog and mixed-signal ICs. Much of those shipments are based on semicustom devices like modem chips and disk-drive ICs. Still, TI outdid all of its competitors in voltage regulators and interface components, like bus drivers and receivers. Its acquisition of Unitrode enabled TI to finish '99 with some $480 million in power management revenues. Among standard linear ICs, data converter shipments were the one area in which TI was sorely behind.

TI had been slowly building strength in data converters-mostly high-speed parts, designed to complement its DSP business. An earlier investment in England's Wolfson Microelectronics gave TI some much-needed expertise. But the acquisition of Burr-Brown-No. 3 in the 1999 data converter market, with $113 million in estimated shipments-shows that TI clearly means business.