Quality policies & procedures

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 enables us to 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 15 internal manufacturing sites as well as external partners, helps us reliably provide products that fill our customers’ needs over the long term.

Internal policies for standard product longevity

Our guidelines state that TI standard products are not eligible for obsolescence if any of these three conditions exist:

• The product has had any sales within the last five years (seven years for automotive or high-reliability products).
• The product can be manufactured and has been in production for less than 10 years.
  
• The product has any current customer demand.
  

These conditions ensure clarity in our effort not to obsolete TI standard products out of convenience.

To aid customer decision-making when selecting products, we clearly designate the product status of each 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 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 number. A generic product number (GPN) represents the range of orderable parts under that GPN.