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. He attended
Northwestern University'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,
Moog,
Sequential Circuits and many others. 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. He died in April 2007 from pancreatic cancer. ==References==