Semiconductor History | Kastanjelaan 500, Eindhoven — The Lab a Light-Bulb Company Built

The plaque on this wall says the building belongs to a light-bulb factory.

Natuurkundig Laboratorium, N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, 1923, in Art Deco capitals with two geometric ornaments underneath.

The physics laboratory behind it was nine years older than the building. Gerard and Anton Philips decided in 1914 that a lamp company needed research of its own, in part so that it would hold patents rather than license other people's.

They hired Gilles Holst to run it, a physicist who had worked with Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at Leiden on metals cooled almost to absolute zero. He directed the lab until 1946.

For its first nine years the NatLab sat inside the Philips complex at the Emmasingel. From 1923 it had this building, designed by Dirk Roosenburg and carrying the internal Philips code SMM.

By the mid-1970s it employed around two thousand people, some six hundred of them with university degrees, and it had a reputation among physicists as a place with academic freedom and no teaching.

The chip industry's debt to it was incurred after the lab left this address.

In 1963 the NatLab moved to a new complex at Waalre, on a street the city later renamed Prof. Holstlaan after that first director, and it was there that Philips research moved into integrated circuits.

Two institutions the semiconductor industry now depends on came out of that orbit, and they are not the same kind of thing.

ASML began in 1984 as a joint venture between Philips and ASM International. Philips' own semiconductor division was separated in 2006 and became NXP.

A third relationship is regularly misdescribed. When 台積電 was founded in 1987 Philips was its cornerstone investor and technology licensor, which is not the same as being a parent company, and the two arrangements should not be run together.

Philips decided in 2000 to take the fences down at Waalre, and the NatLab as a separate institution was wound up the year after. The site is now High Tech Campus Eindhoven, where researchers from many companies work alongside each other.

That is the imec argument arriving in Eindhoven from the other direction: a lab worth more as shared ground than as private property.

In October 2017 the European Physical Society made this building its Historic Site number 36, with the plaque inaugurated on the fifth. The citation calls the NatLab one of the first industrial laboratories to have fundamental research as its main purpose, and that qualifier is doing real work, because most plaques of this kind would have said the first.

Renovation began in 2012 to a design by Peter Claassen. The building is now a cinema, theatre, café and restaurant called Natlab, at Kastanjelaan 500 on Strijp-S, which makes it one of the few addresses in this collection where you can buy a ticket and walk in.

Photo: Rosemoon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the 1923 facade plaque, photographed August 2012).