Klaas Bult: The Broadcom Netherlands Years

I was in the autumn of 1998 that I met Klaas Bult in The Hague, at the European Solid-State Circuits Conference reception. Having met occasionally at earlier conferences, we had a longer chat this time. The reception was held in Madurodam Park, a park in The Hague filled with 1:25 scale models of The Netherlands' most important landmark buildings. For most visitors from abroad, who most probably experience The Netherlands as a scale model of a country anyway, it must have felt like a model of a model of a country. It was in this peculiar setting that Klaas first approached me with the message that "Broadcom is coming to The Netherlands." At that moment, I didn't pay particular attention to the message, as I had just started my career at Philips Research. Klaas must have sensed that, and I remember that he repeated the message quite a few times during our short encounter. Little did I realize that I had just experienced a first glimpse of Klaas's persistence, and that his question, in this setting of very small buildings, was the start of something really big.