Last week, BloggingStocks writer Eric Buscemi brought us the news that Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) intends to spend $1 billion to expand chip assembly and test operations in the Philippines. Analysts are almost unanimously positive on TI performance and now there's one more bit of positive news. SDA Asia Magazine has reported that Larry Tan has been named President of TI's operations in Asia. In light of Tan's 28 year history with TI, from manufacturing on through marketing, Tan is a perfect fit with the new depth of focus that TI has undertaken in its manufacturing flow.

Earlier this year, Texas Instruments adopted a new manufacturing strategy which more closely aligns the expressed needs of their customers with the R&D of TI's third party suppliers. This gives TI a deeper layer of product development and manufacturing control. This strategic shift should give greater quality assurance capabilities to TI and should also speed the processes of product design and development. Texas Instruments now looks at the R&D efforts of its supplier foundries as the first step in its own manufacturing process.

Texas Instruments forecasts that it will spend about $2.3 billion on research and development in 2007. Areas of primary focus shall include: reduced power consumption, reduced costs for digital mobile hardware, reduced size for SRAM memory requirements and analog chip technology. By working more closely with the R&D departments of its third party suppliers to accomplish projects already in process, Texas Instruments will have greater availability of its own resources to apply to new and upcoming technological developments.