In the digital age, some of the most sought-after devices are analog semiconductors—including ones made by 91-year-old Texas Instruments Inc., the company known to consumers for calculators that have been around since the 1970s.
Technology executives say this year’s supply-chain bottlenecks, which have hit parts for everything from iPhones to Ford F-150s, are particularly acute in chips that don’t shuffle zeros and ones. Analog chips treat incoming information about temperature, sound and electrical current more like a human would, on a scale with many gradations.