A synthesizer manufacturing company, founded by Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge. Rossum and Wedge started the company while they were students at the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1971. After a couple of false starts, E-mu found its niche manufacturing modular synthesizers with very high-quality circuitry, controls, and panels. At the same time, the company experimented with both digital systems and microelectronics, resulting in a large body of patents, including the scanning keyboard and a number of synth building-block circuits which were licensed to SSM. For most of the 1970s, the company derived a significant share of its income from patent and design licensing, particularly the licensing of the scanning keyboard patent to Sequential Circuits for the best-selling Prophet-5.