The Ars Frontrunners
The Ars Frontrunners: 15 companies that led and still lead tech innovation
From Google (15 years old) to Corning (162): Companies that change our world.
Lockheed Martin: The home of the Skunk Works
Enlarge / Lockheed's SR-71B trainer, the plane that taught a generation of spy plane pilots to fly faster than a speeding bullet.
Aerospace companies seem to be perpetually engaged in monstrous acts of cannibalism, merging and spinning off and re-merging again in a multi-decade ballet. Lockheed Martin is one of the few, big old names left - though it, too, is made up of many other companies that have been gobbled up. Lockheed, though, has done a few things that other aviation and aerospace companies haven't.
Under the tutelage of aviation legend Kelly Johnson, Lockheed pioneered the "skunk works" concept - a semi-autonomous group of empowered engineers under enlightened management working on a difficult, time-critical goal. Lockheed's Skunk Works (which gained its name from a "Li'l Abner" comic strip featuring a dilapidated moonshine-brewing factory referred to as the "Skonk Works") came to be an official division of Lockheed under Johnson, and the small group designed and produced the U-2 surveillance aircraft for the CIA under tight time pressure. Johnson and his team followed up the U-2 with the Blackbird family of ultra-fast spy planes.
Under Johnson's successor, Ben Rich, the Skunk Works adapted the concept of the stealth aircraft - lifted from an obscure Soviet research paper - from a theory into a fully operational, if unconventional-looking jet called the F-117. Lockheed's Skunk Works went on to produce the F-22 along with a large number of technology demonstrators, though a significant amount of their work remains classified. Despite the secrecy, the Skunk Works model of goal-focused engineers and engineer-focused managers has been copied by numerous other companies, both in and out of aerospace. Boeing operates a "Phantom Works" group with similar goals, and Ford famously spun up its own "Skunk Works"-style organization to design the record-smashing Taurus in the late 1980s.
Beyond airplanes, Lockheed's various divisions famously make things fly, sail, launch, and shoot. On the sea, the company developed and maintains the complex Aegis Combat System that runs the fighting systems of US Navy destroyers. Lockheed helps run the United Launch Alliance joint venture with Boeing that launches Delta and Atlas rockets and their payloads into space. It also makes missiles and guidance systems. And, of course, aircraft - it makes several, including C-130, the F-22, and the beleaguered F-35.
Enlarge / Lockheed's F-22 Raptor.
Physical products aside, Lockheed takes a piece of the lucrative information technology pie with the Lockheed Martin Information Technology subsidiary, which provides many of the same type of outsourced services and consulting as IBM Global Services. LMIT has both public sector and government support contracts.
 - Lee Hutchinson
Don't mess with Texas (Instruments)
The 1967 Cal Tech calculator from Texas Instruments.
In 1951, the owners of Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), which made seismography tools for oil exploration, found themselves increasingly developing electronics equipment for the military during and after WWII. Hoping to harness the business success that came out of that era, GSI created Texas Instruments.
TI purchased a patent license to produce germanium transistors from Western Electric in 1952, and the company started producing germanium transistor radios in 1954. That same year, researchers at Bell Labs produced the first silicon transistors the world had ever seen. These original silicon transistors had many moving parts that required hand-soldering. But in 1958, TI employee Jack Kilby invented the first integrated circuit made up of "a transistor, several resistors, and a capacitor on a sliver of germanium less than half an inch long." Kilby's invention put all the pieces of an electronic circuit onto the same device using the same material, and it paved the way for computing in the future.
At the time, Kilby's invention faced "initial industry skepticism," according to TI's own company history. But between 1961 and 1967, the company worked on getting the integrated circuit into what became the first hand held computer prototype: a calculator code-named "Cal Tech" that weighed 45 ounces. From that project, came the CPU as we know it. And in 1973, TI employee Gary Boone was granted a patent for a "Computing Systems CPU" - the first single-chip microprocessor. By 1975, TI was producing electronic watches, although it only continued production until 1981.
From there, Texas Instruments' next big milestone product was a single-chip speech synthesizer, which replicated the human voice for the first time. It gained widespread popularity in TI's first toy: the Speak & Spell (yes, like from E.T.), which used Linear Predictive Coding to model human voices.
But the 80's were a dry decade for Texas Instruments. The company built a personal computer in 1979 called the TI99/4 to compete with the Apple II and the Tandy/RadioShack TRS-80, but the company discontinued the 99/4's successor (the 99/4A). Its follow-up computer, the TIProfessional, did equally poorly. In 1983, TI announced its withdrawal from the PC market after losing $680 million that year. Throughout the 80's, TI saw its market share for semiconductors drop from 30 percent to just five percent of the market by 1989. Jerry Junkins, elected the President and CEO of the company in 1985, sought to turn this around through a policy of loosening corporate culture to stimulate innovation. TI started partnering with companies like Sun Microsystems, General Electric, Sony, and Ericsson to make custom-designed microprocessors and digital signal processors (DSPs).
Texas Instruments began building microprocessor facilitates globally, partnering with other electronics companies to share the risk. Sales started rebounding by 1993, and TI became a major manufacturer of DSPs. In 1997, TI sold its failing memory chip business to Micron for $880 million and began acquiring smaller companies at a rapid pace, all while keeping its analog semiconductor business going strong.
In 2000, TI "formed a partnership with Qualcomm Inc. in which both companies were allowed to supply integrated circuits for all wireless standards without infringing on patent rights." It also partnered with Imax Corp. to develop digital projectors for the theaters.
The rest has been a lot of recent history. Despite some market bumps in the 2000s, today Texas Instruments is the largest producer of analog semiconductors and digital signal processors. The company is also making significant inroads in the mobile device market by licensing ARM platforms for its processors. As such, it's become the second largest supplier of chips for cellphones, as well as the third largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.
In the recent past, TI pieces have appeared in hundreds of notable products, including dozens that Ars has written about. In no particular order: a Digital Light Processor for a 3D HDTV, Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire, the ersatz Nexus Q, the Kin Two, brand-new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems, and the 2012 iPod nano.
 - Megan Geuss
Intel: Breaking trail for computing's evolution
Enlarge / Intel has continued to survive and thrive despite the constantly shifting markets it competes in.Intel
Intel has been a dominant player in personal computing for much longer than 15 years, but it has been one of the few companies to survive and thrive while technology continues accelerating. Its processors (and their accompanying x86 instruction set) originally rose to dominance alongside the original IBM PCs and, later, IBM compatible clones. Those clones and the popularity of PC-compatible operating systems like MS-DOS and Windows made x86 and Intel a mainstay in personal computing.
While Intel's early years were dominated by the need to produce ever-faster CPUs, the last 15 years have ushered in a sea change where power usage became more important than pure performance. Intel's performance-focused, power-hungry Pentium 4 wasn't a good fit for the increasingly affordable and popular laptop form factor, so the company designed a new CPU called the Pentium M specifically for mobile computers. That chip's balanced approach to performance and power consumption later spread across Intel's entire product line, and now even its server CPUs take power consumption into consideration in ways that they didn't before. All of Intel's CPUs dynamically adjust clock speeds and voltage and shut off unused portions of the CPU so that they can offer performance when it's needed without sucking down too much juice when it isn't. Newer features like Turbo Boost also help its chips do small amounts of work faster, increasing the amount of time the chips can stay in their idle power states (thus increasing battery life).
In addition to its CPUs, Intel has helped to popularize wireless networking through its Centrino branding initiative. Its integrated graphics processors have also taken huge strides in recent years - gamers once scoffed at the idea of playing on Intel's GPUs, but its more recent chips can play even high-end modern games fluidly if you play without the settings cranked all the way up.
The next frontier for Intel is mobile, and while ARM and its partners have a head start in smartphones and tablets, Intel is quickly catching up. Its newest Atom chips, codenamed "Bay Trail," bring sizable performance increases over last year's "Clover Trail" chips while still maintaining good battery life. Intel is leveraging its industry-leading chip manufacturing facilities to offer better performance than the competition in the same power envelope, which it hopes will eventually compel companies like Samsung and Asus to use more of its chips in their mobile devices. ARM is very entrenched in this space, but if Intel can continue to offer competitive products, that could easily begin to change.
Throughout all of these transitions - from desktop to laptop, and from laptop to smartphone - branding and marketing have been two of Intel's greatest strengths. Most consumers have never bought an actual processor from Intel (even if many of our readers are enthusiasts who have built their own PCs at one time or another), but thanks to catchy advertising and omnipresent stickers, the company is still a household name. That definitely counts for something.