The People Behind the Chip |
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There is a relatively small office building in the beautiful area of Scott's Valley, California. In this office work some
of the greatest minds in the field of audio innovation world-wide! The name of this group is the Creative ATC (Advanced
Technology Center) and its sole raison d'etre is to bring continuous innovation to Creative products.
The group was initially
formed in 1994 by former EMU founder Dave Rossum shortly after Creative acquired EMU. At that time, Mr. Rossum began the
process of building an elite R&D organization by recruiting top-notch scientists and engineers from industry and academia.
Today at ATC, there are 60 people on staff in 4 departments: VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration)/FW, Operations, Software, and
Audio Research. ATC provides the full range of technologies spanning from chip IP, VLSI, FW and FW Architectures, DSP and
3D architectures, to SW applications, drivers, and system architecture and delivers these technologies to all of Creative's various
product groups.
The group includes 11 PhDs who continue to publish and participate regularly in many of the most important audio research and
industrial communities. The personnel includes people from all over the world, many from the top computer music institutions
such as CCARMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford, IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et
Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, and CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) at UCBerkeley. Many of
the ATC technical staff members are accomplished musicians and all share a passion for audio!
This team has been able to consistently anticipate and dictate PC audio trends and deliver audio
processor solutions with exceptional audio capability at truly mass-market accessible prices. It is telling that
in the last 10 years no other company has developed technologies and audio processors the likes of which
Creative has released. Similarly, no other company has shown the same commitment to driving audio forwards.
