Play It Again, TI!

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Our instruments (even the tuba!) have pointed to a nice little recovery in the semiconductor market recently. Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) agrees, as the chip titan just raised and narrowed its guidance ranges for the current quarter.

Here's the updated picture in full Technicolor:

Metric	Revenue (billions)	EPS
Updated 2Q Guidance	$2.3 to $2.5	$0.14 to $0.22
Original Guidance	$1.95 to $2.4	$0.01 to $0.15
Year-ago Results	$3.35	$0.44

TI is clearly seeing better results than expected back in April, when the company offered the original guidance figures. It's still a long way away from the pre-crash levels of last year, but if this recovery is real, then year-over-year comparisons should start to look more favorable pretty soon.

Company spokesman Ron Slaymaker said that the recovery was spread out across all segments and geographies, but with a few pockets of particular strength.

Asia is doing better than Europe or the Americas. This makes sense, since most of the factories that make gadgets out of TI's chips are over there, whether the end product is an all-American Palm (Nasdaq: PALM) Pre handset or a Finnish Nokia (NYSE: NOK) wireless baseband station.

And speaking of handsets and wireless infrastructure, Slaymaker fingered those segments as some of his best performers this half-quarter. The phone people are buying chips in volume again. They wouldn't do that unless they fully expected to sell the digital trinkets. In other words, TI is the bringer of good news for investors in Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), and LM Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC), among other major wireless hardware players.

Now, we shouldn't take this announcement as absolute gospel, because TI has missed these updated targets several times in the recent past. Everyone makes mistakes now and then. But it is a positive sign for semiconductors in general, and for large TI customers in particular.

My guitar gently concurs.

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