President’s Bio

David Knittle, President and founder of Automation Specialists Inc. maintains over 13 years experience bringing security, music, theater, and electronic systems integration into the custom home market with the goals of simple intuitive operation, aesthetically pleasing solutions and future-proof solutions. David earned his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1985. He moved to Silicon Valley shortly thereafter in pursuit of what now entails 23 years of electronic systems experience working for several fast paced electronic companies. Now residing in Tucson, Arizona, David involves himself annually with over 50 residential custom installed projects ranging in size from several thousand square feet to tens of thousands of square feet.

EXPERIENCE

8/04 - Present Creative Solutions & Integration, LLC., Tucson, AZ

Member of LLC. We provide the design, installation and integration of low to medium cost home entertainment and technology for living system for the production/semi-customhome buyer. Our position is to deliver pre-designed and proven solutions that are easy to use. Components include security, home theater, whole house music systems, satellite, central vacuum, wiring systems and intercom.

1/96 - Present Automation Specialists Inc., Tucson, AZ

President and owner. We provide design, installation and integration of residential home entertainment and technology for living systems, for the custom/luxury home buyer. Our position is to deliver the complete solution that’s aesthetically appealing and easy to use. Components include climate control automation, lighting automation, security, home theater, distributed audio and video, sophisticated control systems, LAN’s, wiring systems, CCTV, satellite, communications systems and other low voltage systems.

1/93 - 1/97 Rincon Research Corporation, Tucson, AZ

As a Senior Member of the Technical Staff, my duties included designing signal processing circuit cards and integrating them into a system which performs high speed adaptive interference canceling. The system was called a Transmultiplexer Interference Canceler. I coordinated with two subcontractors on the effort and performed numerous field installations at customer sites around the world.

4/89 - 1/93 Applied Signal Technology, Sunnyvale, CA

Proposal Manager of a $4.5M effort to build a state of the art PCM Equalizer-Demodulator.

Managed 10 individuals who contributed to the effort. Duties included delegation of assignments, overseeing progress, evaluating content and structured final package.

Program manager of a $630k contract. Assumed responsibilities to revive a program in financial jeopardy. Successfully managed, motivated and provided technical support, and performed many technical functions to deliver the product at the contract price.

Test and integration manager for the development of a PCM Equalizer-Demodulator. After successful delivery, over $10M of follow on contracts have been booked. Duties included performing a majority of the test and integration, identifying tasks, scheduling, tracking earned value and managing two engineers.

ASIC designer for a Variable Rate Lowpass Decimation Filter. Design consisted of 38,000 gates with a maximum data rate of 50 MHz. Duties included the design, simulation and layout. Working silicon was available on schedule.

7/85 - 4/89 Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, Sunnyvale, CA

Development and prototype of a rate doubling/buffer board with 4.5 Mbit storage capacity. Data rates were as high as 25 MHz.

Design and development of hardware, which emulates the Huffman expansion algorithm. Involved a mix of ECL and TTL operating at 33 MHz data rates.

Designed support test equipment and implemented a universal test procedure for a 17-board subsystem, which verified interface protocols and hardware functionality.

Supported the design of a computer interface module, which emulates the VME bus protocol.

Summer 1984 Public Service Company of New Mexico, Waterflow, New Mexico

Promoted a project package for bidding. Evaluated bids and awarded the successful bidder the contract.

Supervised the completion of projects from initial project bidding to final demonstration.

Tracked projects progress to ensure materials and processes were in compliance with specifications and compared contractor’s expenses with initial bid price.

EDUCATION BSEE, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

ACTIVITIES Golf, skiing, soccer, flying (private pilot’s license).

TOOLS

Hardware: Low Voltage TTL, CMOS, ECL, PLD, TMS320C30 DSP Processor, Microcontrollers, VME, RS422, RS232, FPGA by QuickLogic, Altera, Xilinx.

Software: C, PASCAL, Assembly, MS Word, Excel, Project, X-Midas, Net Media’s TABS Scripted Language, JDS Technologies Windows Event Manager, LiteTouch, PHAST, Crestron, CentraLite, Pronto, Universal Remote Control.

Tools: Sun Microsystems/UNIX workstations, DEC Alpha VMS 3800/3900/2100/4100, PC DOS, ABEL, TMS320C30 Emulator/Debugger, Motorola Evaluation Module.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays: QuickLogic, Altera, Xilinx.

Clearances: Special Background Investigation and Polygraph.