Evaluation Engineering - 9

Texas Instruments Plans
to Build Up Inventory
as Uncertainty Looms
Texas Instruments in April
reported sales and profits on
the high end of its quarterly
forecasts, buoyed by customers building up inventory to
protect against delays in supply stemming from the coronavirus outbreak.
Rich Templeton, Texas
Instruments' chief executive
officer, said on a conference
call that it plans to maintain
production at about the same
level as the beginning of the
year even as customers become more cautious. He said
its spending on research and
development would remain
unchanged. The company also
plans to push ahead with billions of dollars of investment
in a new analog production
plant under construction in
Richardson, Texas.
Templeton said it has mostly been business as usual for
Texas Instruments despite
some unforeseen disruptions
to its production and supply
lines. He said the company
has been rolling out parts to
customers with short, stable
lead times. Texas Instruments
is taking advantage of its vast
manufacturing operations
to package and test its final
components in-house instead
of sending them out to contractors in China, Europe, or
Southeast Asia.
Texas Instruments said
sales slipped 7% to $3.33
billion in the first quarter of
2020, on the high end of its
guidance of $3.12 billion to
$3.38 billion. Profits dipped
slightly from $1.22 billion or
$1.26 per share a year ago to
$1.17 billion or $1.24 a share.
Texas Instruments' core analog semiconductor business
slipped by only around 2%

over the last year, while chips
sold to customers in embedded plunged 18% from a year
ago, the company said.
Texas Instruments, which
tends to report results ahead
of other chip manufacturers, said that it widened the
range of its revenue forecast
to reflect the worsening uncertainty and deepening panic
in the population. Profits are
projected to be between $0.64
and $1.04 a share in the second quarter of 2020, down
from $1.36 a share a year ago.
It also predicts revenue in the
range of $2.61 billion to $3.19
billion, dipping from $3.67 billion a year ago.

Ball Aerospace Completes
CDR for Space Force's
Weather Satellite
By concluding its critical design review (CDR) of the U.S.
Space Force's Weather System
Follow-on (WSF) satellite,
Ball Aerospace is now entering into the full production
phase of producing the advanced satellite system. The
firm is building the satellite
for the U.S. Space Force Space
and Missile Systems Center
(SMC). The next-generation
operational environmental

satellite system will provide
environmental intelligence to
military operations as needed.
"Measuring and understanding the physical environment is critical to military
operations, from determining
tropical cyclone intensity for
asset protection and maneuver operations to how wind
and sea state play into assured
access and aircraft carrier
operations," said Mark Healy,
vice president and general
manager for National Defense
at Ball Aerospace.
The WSF is meant to provide the U.S. Department of
Defense with environment
intelligence it may not be
receiving from Space-Based
Environmental Monitoring
(SBEM) sources, including
ocean surface vector winds
and low-earth-orbit (LEO)
charged energy particles. The
WSF will also help to monitor
sea ice characterization, soil
moisture and snow depth. Ball
Aerospace is the prime contractor for the program and
is responsible for developing
instrumentation, spacecraft
and system software, and the
algorithms for the data products and delivering them to
the SMC.

This AEHF-6 military communications satellite was launched at Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station to join the collection of spacecrafts, including the Weather
System Follow-on WSF satellite.
United Launch Alliance

FCC Opens 6-GHz Band
to Wi-FiTop of Form
The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) has adopted rules that make 1200 MHz
of spectrum in the 6-GHz band
(5.925-7.125 GHz) available
for unlicensed use. These new
rules will usher in Wi-Fi 6, the
next generation of Wi-Fi, and
play a major role in the growth
of the Internet of Things. Wi-Fi
6 will be over 2.5X faster than
the current standard and deliver improved performance.
Opening the 6-GHz band for
unlicensed use will also increase the amount of spectrum
available for Wi-Fi by nearly a
factor of five and help improve
rural connectivity.
The 6 GHz band is currently populated by, among others, microwave services that
are used to support utilities,
public safety, and wireless
backhaul. Unlicensed devices
will share this spectrum with
incumbent licensed services
The Report and Order authorizes indoor low-power
operations over the full 1200
MHz and standard-power
devices in 850 MHz of the 6
GHz band. An automated frequency coordination system
will prevent standard power
access points from operating where they could cause
interference to incumbent
services.
The Further Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking seeks
comment on a proposal to
permit very low-power devices to operate across the
6-GHz band to support high
data-rate applications including high-performance, wearable, augmented-reality, and
virtual-reality devices. The
notice also seeks comment
on increasing the power at
which low-power indoor access points may operate.

MAY/JUNE 2020 EVALUATIONENGINEERING.COM

9
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Evaluation Engineering

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