Doug Curtis (March 8, 1951 – January 10, 2007) was the founder of Curtis Electromusic Specialties and OnChip Systems. Curtis was the designer of many original analogue ICs, used in a number of notable

electronic music instruments An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into ...

. He was described in ''Keyboard'' as "one of the most important and least known synthesizer pioneers of the 20th century".

Biography

While attending high school, Curtis combined his aptitude for physics and mathematics with an interest in music and synthesizers to design and build an

analog synthesizer An analog synthesizer () is a synthesizer that uses Analogue electronics, analog circuits and analog signals to generate sound electronically. The earliest analog synthesizers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Trautonium, were built with a var ...

. He attended

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

's School of Communications, where he majored in radio/television/film and built several other synthesizers. Upon graduation, he qualified for a post as junior engineer by showing circuit boards of his designs. He entered a competition to design a semi-custom chip and won, resulting in a job at Interdesign, where he worked for four years. In 1979 he founded Curtis Electromusic Specialties (CEM), which produced the integrated circuits that were used in a variety of analog synthesizers for decades, beginning with projects for Oberheim Electronics and ARP, and later including

Roland Roland (; ; or ''Rotholandus''; or ''Rolando''; died 15 August 778) was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. The historical Roland was mil ...

, Moog,

Sequential Circuits Sequential is an American synthesizer company founded in 1974 as Sequential Circuits by Dave Smith. In 1978, Sequential released the Prophet-5, the first programmable polyphonic synthesizer, which was widely used in the music industry. In the ...

and many others. Curtis'

voltage-controlled filter A voltage-controlled filter (VCF) is an electronic filter whose operating characteristics (primarily cutoff frequency) can be set by an input control voltage. Voltage-controlled filters are widely used in synthesizers. A music synthesizer VCF ...

, often referred to as a 'Curtis filter', is said to have ''that Curtis sound'', described as "saturated, brash and powerful". He was awarded patents for several of his designs. In 1988, Curtis established the company OnChip Systems in order to offer semi-custom chips for a broad range of applications and industries. In 2006 Curtis was inducted into the San Jose Rocks Hall of Fame for technical contributions to music. He died in April 2007 from pancreatic cancer.

References

External links

Curtis Electromusic
website

page on Doug Curtis
Obituary
in ''San Jose Mercury News'' 14 Jan 2007 {{DEFAULTSORT:Curtis, Doug Computer hardware engineers American audio engineers 2007 deaths 1951 births 20th-century American engineers 20th-century American inventors