IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020 - 15

(SoC) implementations, Klaas was
a driving force-in the company as
well as in the international academic
community-toward bringing all data
converters "on board" the SoC. In this
model, which is now embraced by
the whole semiconductor industry,
all analog-to-digital and digital-toanalog conversions are integrated on
the SoC, while the signal conditioning
is pushed as much as possible from
the analog into the digital domain.
As an early protagonist driving this
architecture, Klaas pushed this model
forward into the Broadcom SoCs and
gave Broadcom a very meaningful
advantage over its competitors, specifically in its first decade.

Building the Team
Around the turn of the century, Klaas
decided to return to his home country,
starting the Broadcom design center
in Bunnik, The Netherlands (Fig--ure 1).
To import the "Broadcom spirit" and
its start-up mentality to The Netherlands, he persuaded three members
of the Irvine team to join him and
move to The Netherlands as well.
Chi-Hung Lin, Chris Ward, and Dave
Kruse moved from the warm comfort
of Southern California to the cold and
wet weather of The Netherlands and
started the design center with Klaas.
Soon, they were joined by four designers from Philips Research: Frank van
der Goes, Marcel Lugthart, Jan Mulder, and Jan Westra. Els van der Zijl
completed the team, assisting with
everything nontechnical. By far, the
most important and almost unbelievable addition to the team was Rudy
van de Plassche, who at the time was
already no less than a legendary professor and Philips Research veteran.
Rudy, with all his great experience,
joined the young team to become its
academic and industrial conscience.
With Klaas leading and Rudy as a fulltime mentor, the team had nothing
less than a dream start (Figure 2).
The early years of Broadcom Netherlands were characterized by an
extreme start-up mentality. Everyone
was working long and late hours, and
the team was operating as an almost

independent yet very integrated start
up within the larger company. While
the team focused on developing
the analog front ends for the early
1GBASE-T Ethernet implementations,
cable modems, and set-top boxes,
Klaas and Rudy made sure we always
stayed on track in a perfect symbiosis of academia and industry. Innovation was always stimulated while
keeping a steady foot on the ground
to ensure economic and industrial
viability. Whenever necessary, Rudy
would smilingly raise his slightly
curved index finger, exclaiming, "Ho,
Ho, Baas!" ("Ho, Ho, Chief!") when one
of the younger engineers would drift
away on a cloud of unnecessary outof-this-world innovation drive mixed
with completely unjustified selfconsciousness. Anyone who has ever
tasted the fatherly and, yes, loving
mentorship of Rudy will agree with
me that the world of electronics will
very likely never see a wiser and more
committed, yet extremely amiable,
mentor than Rudy. We still miss him
dearly, every single day.

The Manager
The Broadcom Netherlands team, led
by Klaas, delivered its first front ends
and earned its position within the
growing company. Klaas managed the
Broadcom Netherlands team and laid
out the technical path for the team
and the company. Soon he would find
out that leading a team of engineers
in The Netherlands is quite different
from leading a team of U.S. engineers.
More than once, Klaas smilingly
complained to me that people in the
United States actually just listened to
him, respected his opinion, and went
off and designed circuits, which was
quite different from the company
culture in The Netherlands, where
everybody's-including the bosses'-
opinions are always tested in lively
discussions and debates before the
team accepts or does anything. That
was a big change that I am sure he
actually enjoyed more than he would
ever admit. After all, Klaas will always
be "the technical guy," rather than
"the boss," no matter what title was

printed on his business card. Soon,
Klaas was promoted to vice president
and chief technology officer (CTO) of
the Central Engineering Business unit,
which gave the small Netherlands
team the weird but luxurious position
of being managed directly by one of
Broadcom's CTOs.

The Innovator
In 2007, the team had matured, and
its focus had shifted away from the
tasks it had been doing since 2000
toward 10GBASE-T Ethernet front
ends for copper interconnects. It was
an exciting period because quite a
few start-up companies tried to enter
the Ethernet market and eat Broadcom's lunch, which, of course, we
had to prevent from happening. Klaas
enjoyed those times more than anything else: creating innovative solutions for new products, with one leg
in academia, the other in industry-
writing patents and papers in almost
equal numbers-as well as creating
solutions and driving the team in the
right direction but always in tandem
with the team. Klaas used to join all
the members behind whiteboards
and during meetings to come up with
the best solutions for new products,
always using only those whiteboards
plus pen, paper, and plain old trusted
Spice. Just like Olympic athletes who
warm up and optimize their position and posture for the next match,
Klaas would sit down on one chair,
leaning on its back legs, with his feet
on another chair, hands behind his
neck as if to give room to some brilliant ideas, allowing them to move
and stream around freely before they
found output as spoken words to
be devoured by his sparring partners. Despite his innovative strength
throughout the whole design hierarchy, Klaas is mostly known for his
remarkable transistor-level innovations. In the 21st century, when
we would expect that all transistorlevel circuits should be known by
now, he still manages to come up
with very simple, very elegant transistor-level solutions the world has
not seen before.

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