page_title: Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium
section_title: The end: 1972-present
hierarchical_section_title: Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium / History / The end: 1972-present
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: High Tech Campus Eindhoven (NL) - De slimste plek ter wereld! Deze afbeelding wordt u aangeboden door www.microtoerisme.nlEnglish: High Tech Campus Eindhoven (The Netherlands) - The smartest place on earth. This picture is presented to you by www.microtoerisme.nl
context_page_description: The Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium or NatLab was the Dutch section of the Philips research department, which did research for the product divisions of that company. Originally located in the Strijp district of Eindhoven, the facility moved to Waalre in the early 1960s. A 1972 municipal rezoning brought the facility back into Eindhoven, which was followed some years later by Eindhoven renaming the street the facility is on into the Prof. Holstlaan, after the first director.
  In 1975, the NatLab employed some 2000 people, including 600 researchers with university degrees. Research done at the NatLab has ranged from product-specific to fundamental research into electronics, physics and chemistry, as well as computing science and information technology.
  The original NatLab facility was disbanded in 2001 and the facility has been transformed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, which is open to researchers from many different companies. Philips Research is still one of the largest campus tenants, although not with anything like the number of people employed in the NatLab days.
context_section_description: The period under Casimir was a time of great success and achievement for the NatLab. But the time after his retirement in 1972 was one of decline and loss.
  In 1973, starting with the oil crisis, the long period of economic growth came to an end and companies could no longer afford expensive research departments. With that economic reality, the belief in the stimulating value of fundamental research also seemed to disappear. On top of that, a number of bad decisions by the NatLab management did little to ingratiate the facility to the Philips Board of Directors (such bad decisions including the development of the flopped videodisc, the Video 2000 videocassette recorder, and the initial lack of support for the compact disc.
  The compact disc had been initiated and pushed by the audio department, although NatLab researcher Kees Schouhamer Immink played an instrumental role in its design. For the industry group 'Audio' and the NatLab the development of a small optical audio disc started early in 1974. The sound quality of this disc had to be superior to that of the large and vulnerable vinyl record. To realize this, Lou Ottens, technical director of 'Audio', formed a seven-person project group. Vries and Diepeveen were members of this project group. In March 1974, during an Audio-VLP meeting Peek and Vries recommended a digital audio registration because an error-correcting code could be included. Vries and Diepeveen built an error-correcting coder-decoder that was delivered in the summer of 1978. The decoder was included in the CD prototype player that was presented to the international press. The error-correcting coder-decoder was abandoned in 1979 in favor of Sony’s superior CIRC code, which became the adopted CD's standard. To commemorate this breakthrough, Philips received an IEEE Milestone Award on March 6, 2009. This breakthrough was also appreciated by Sony and they started a cooperation with Philips that resulted in June 1980 in a common CD system standard.
  In 1985 Kees Teer retired as director. Philips as a whole took a turn for the worse and by the end of the 1980s bankruptcy seemed a very real possibility. Under research director Kees Bulthuis the position of long-term fundamental research at NatLab came under more and more pressure, especially after Philips introduced decentralized financing. Bulthuis reduced research budgets by the equivalent of 60 million euro in three years' time. Hundreds of NatLab employees were fired and departments were closed, including the entire mathematics department in Brussels. By 1989 the NatLab, which had formerly been on the Board of Directors budget, drew two-thirds of its income from contracts with the product divisions. This made the role of the NatLab far more limited than before: it became a source of expertise rather than a source of innovation. In 1998, when Arie Huijser became general research director, top researchers Joseph Braat, Rudy van de Plassche, 
  Kees Schouhamer Immink, and Dieter Kasperkovitz
  resigned, further accelerating NatLabs's decline. Kees Schouhamer Immink, in a newspaper interview, told 
  that the research management was a chaos which spoiled the atmosphere. As a result, academic freedom was far gone. Fundamental research, research driven purely by curiosity, was strictly reined in and priority was given to the short-term interests of the product divisions.
  In 2000, Philips decided on a new direction for the NatLab and the grounds it was housed on: The decision was made to transform and sell the whole of it into an open innovation facility for technology companies, of which Philips Research was only a small one. The name chosen for this new facility is the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, which has by now completely subsumed the old NatLab. This decision by Philips also fit with the new direction chosen by the company, "Health and Lifestyle".
  Philips has divested itself of branches like the Lighting and semiconductors branches (now the independent NXP), which has reduced the on-site size of Philips Research to 200 as of 2016.
caption: High Tech Campus, Eindhoven
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