At Texas Instruments (TI), we know that semiconductor product longevity and supply continuity are important to you; they are important to us as well. TI’s product life cycles are typically 10 to 15 years and often extend longer, consistent with many customers’ requirements. We are committed to product longevity for our customers and have strategies and internal policies in place to uphold this commitment.
Strategies for product longevity
We have inventory and manufacturing strategies in place to allow us to offer products that exist for a decade or more. Our inventory management strategy means that we anticipate market demand for products that are catalog or “standard,” a TI internal designation that includes catalog products offered and/or sold to many customers. Our flexible manufacturing strategy, with 14 manufacturing sites in nine countries, helps us reliably provide TI products that fill our customers’ needs over the long term.
Internal policies for product longevity
We make an effort not to obsolete TI standard products out of convenience, and we have procedures in place to ensure that we can stand by this. We have established clear guidelines to ensure that we only consider a TI standard product for obsolescence when three conditions simultaneously exist: the product has had no sales for the last five years (seven years for automotive or high-reliability products), it has been in production for at least 10 years, and there is no current customer demand.
To aid customer decision-making when selecting TI products, we clearly designate the product status of each TI product as preview, active, not recommended for new designs (NRND), last time buy or obsolete. To reinforce our commitment to product longevity, on the rare occasions when we classify a TI product as NRND, we do this only if there is a potential issue that may affect product quality or our ability to manufacture the product over the long term.
Additional information regarding our policies on product change management product withdrawal and discontinuance, and our business continuity program can be found in our general quality guidelines.
Each product page on TI.com includes the product status alongside the TI standard product part number. A generic part number (GPN) represents the range of orderable materials under that GPN.
You can find a wide range of design support on TI.com including parametric product search and cross reference search tools or see the TI E2ETM support forums. If you are looking for an automotive or high-reliability product, these products are visible in our parametric product search tools by filtering on the Rating parameter and have -Q1 (automotive), -EP (Enhanced Product) or -HT (high temperature) appended after the part number on TI.com.