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Over 60 years ago a British-born businessman, Cecil H Green, helped to found Texas Instruments, one of North America's largest and most important electronics groups. The company introduced the integrated circuit board – the device that made possible the microelectronics revolution. The company today has a turnover of about $8bn, and more than 40,000 staff. Texas Instruments was established in 1941; it grew out of an oil exploration group, Geophysical Service.

Green joined the company in 1932 and spent several years looking for oil in Texas. With the start of the Second World War, the company's electronics division grew rapidly. Green and three colleagues bought the business in 1941 for $300,000. It was renamed Texas Instruments in 1951. Green was a director until his retirement in 1975.

Cecil Howard Green was born near Manchester, England. His engineer father, Charles, and mother, Maggie, emigrated to Canada when Green was less than two years old, and the family moved frequently through the US and Canada as Charles looked for work. Green attended high school in Vancouver and entered the University of British Columbia in 1918, completing his studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, with a Master's degree in electrical engineering.

His first job was to design steam turbine generators for the General Electric Company but in two years he left to join the Raytheon Manufacturing Company to work on small electronics devices. Between 1928 and 1932, Green worked for a number of engineering groups before the final move to Geophysical Service. Cecil Howard Green died in 2003 at the age of 102.