Texas Instruments Lab at UC Berkeley

Texas Instruments (TXN) or "TI” announced its donation of a state-of-the-art electronics teaching lab worth $2.2 million to the University of California, Berkeley to encourage engineering students.

The new Electronics lab will be housed in Cory Hall, the Electrical Engineering Division of UC Berkeley. The new lab will provide hands-on experience to more than 1000 engineering undergraduates in microelectronic circuits and other electrical engineering instruments. The lab will include prototyping platforms from National Instruments ( NATI - Snapshot Report ) , measurement equipment by Agilent Technologies ( A - Analyst Report ) as well as a variety of TI’s products such as integrated circuits (ICs) and analog and embedded processing products.

The lab will equip students with workstations, a development station and related tools, which will allow them to work and solve complex problems, which they might face later on in real situations.

The lab is part of TI’s ongoing efforts to develop R&D resources in the Silicon Valley and further promote its global University Program. Further, the University of California, Berkeley, with TI and National Instruments is planning to develop and launch an online version of the Microelectronic Circuits course, which will be offered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the future.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012, TI generated total revenue of $2.98 billion, down 12.1% sequentially and 12.9% year over year (slightly better than the mid-point of the recently narrowed guidance range of $2.89 billion to $3.01 billion). The Analog business fell 9.4% sequentially and 1.5% year over year. The sequential decline was attributable to broad-based weakness across the HVAL, HPA, SVA and power management product lines.

Texas Instruments has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Intersil Corp. ( ISIL - Snapshot Report ) , another semiconductor stock, is worth considering with is carrying the same Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).