Anyone who’s been around semiconductors knows the pattern: supply crunch, panic buying, then oversupply and falling prices. It’s a cycle the industry has lived through many times.

But what’s happening with Texas Instruments (TI) doesn’t fit the usual story. This isn’t just another bump in the road. It feels more like a reset one that changes how procurement teams need to think about their future sourcing.

Over the past year, TI has raised prices on more than 60,000 parts. We’re not talking about specialty products tucked away in niche markets. These are mainstream analog, power, and industrial chips that companies have been using for years without disruption.

In the past, TI built its reputation on stability fair pricing, broad availability, and long-term reliability. That balance has shifted. The company has clearly moved to a “margin-first” approach, where even long-standing, well-established devices are seeing price jumps of 15 to 20 percent.

As one automotive procurement manager summed it up:

“We thought those old TI parts were safe. Now they’re not. And the prices aren’t going back down.”

Unlike metals or plastics, you can’t swap semiconductors quickly. Qualifying a new supplier can take anywhere from six months to two years, depending on how complex the part is, and if you’re in automotive, aerospace, or medical, you’re usually on the longer end.

That’s the painful part. Costs rise overnight, but the fix is a long way off. One industrial buyer told us that just the compliance paperwork to qualify an alternate took half a year. By the time engineering signs off, the company will have lived with a full fiscal year of inflated costs.

The message is simple: waiting until the invoices spike means you’re already too late.

On paper, you can sometimes find similar parts from other suppliers. In reality, it’s rarely straightforward. Pin-to-pin replacements are uncommon, and even when the data-sheets look like a close match, validation testing often shows differences in heat behaviour, tolerance, or long-term stability.

One automotive team found a part that looked like a 95% match. It still took nine months and four rounds of testing before engineers felt comfortable approving it. And that was for just one device. For half their BOM, they admitted, there isn’t even a viable option yet.

That said, opportunities do exist. Some competitors in analog and power management have broadened their product lines, and there are second-source options for certain signal chain devices. But these chances only benefit the companies who start mapping today.

Sectors like automotive and industrial are particularly exposed. Cars today rely heavily on legacy TI devices, especially in control units. Industrial automation and robotics are also built on TI’s analog and power components.

At first glance, a 10 or 20 percent increase might not sound like a crisis. But scale changes everything. A European EV manufacturer calculated that TI’s new prices added €85 to every control unit on one platform. Multiply that across 200,000 vehicles, and it wiped out half of the savings they had clawed back from battery packs earlier in the year.

This isn’t just a procurement headache. It flows straight into the P&L.

Some buyers are still hoping this blows over. The smarter ones aren’t taking that risk. What we’re seeing across the industry:

• Running cost benchmarks to see where TI is out of step with peers.
• Zeroing in on the 10 -15% of high-exposure devices that carry the most risk.
• Pre-qualifying alternates now, even if they’re not used immediately.
• Quietly sharing notes with peers and sometimes even competitors to speed up validation and avoid duplication of effort.

Tools like MyChip1 make this process easier by showing real-time lifecycle status, alternate options, and which parts others are already qualifying. It doesn’t solve everything, but it gives procurement a clearer starting point.

In the past, buyers could rely on suppliers like TI to stabilize costs when the broader market went haywire. 

That safety net is gone. TI has made profitability the priority. This isn’t a short-term market swing, it’s a deliberate strategy shift.

TI’s price hikes aren’t a temporary spike. They’re a long-term reset.

Companies that start planning now mapping exposures, engaging engineering early, lining up second sources will be the ones that protect their margins. Those who wait will end up paying the bill with little room to manoeuvre.

This is not about riding out another cycle. It’s about adapting to a new normal where old assumptions no longer apply.

What you’ll get in under 3 minutes:

Track lead times and monitor price swings across key component categories

Spot lifecycle risks early and anticipate EOL issues before they impact production

Cross references & vetted alternatives (including MyChip1 insights)

Notes from our quality control labs, what’s failing, what’s trending

Global supply disruptions or rebounds, decoded by our team

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