René Raaijmakers is a Dutch tech journalist, entrepreneur, author, and publisher specializing in semiconductors, lithography, and high-tech systems. He is the founder of Bits&Chips (1999) and High Tech Institute (2011). He is also the author of “Natlab”, “De geldmachine” [“The money machine”] and “ASML’s architects,” a detailed history of ASML’s early development from the 1960s onwards. He’s currently working on a sequel to the ASML book covering the company’s more recent history from 1996 to 2023.

Born in Oirschot in 1960, he studied solid-state chemistry at Radboud University Nijmegen before moving into journalism in 1989. More than three decades later, his scientific background remains central to his work, enabling him to report on semiconductor technology, lithography and systems engineering with a level of technical depth rarely found in today’s media landscape.

His main interest isn’t the technology itself, but the people behind it and its societal implications. That’s why he’s especially interested in systems engineering and systems architecture, areas where people make a real difference and impact.

In the 1990s, he built his reputation as a freelance journalist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, for which he covered the Philips Research Laboratories (Natlab). He also reported for the trade magazines Intermediair, Automatisering Gids and Computable, covering the semiconductor and ICT sectors as they reshaped the global economy. In his early years as a science writer, he frequently traveled to Silicon Valley to attend conferences such as ISSCC and SPIE and to cover companies including Intel, Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and MIPS.

Disappointed that the Dutch media often failed to appreciate technical depth in journalism, he founded Techwatch and launched his own trade magazine, Bits&Chips – now the leading trade publication for the Benelux high-tech industry.

In 2011, he co-founded High Tech Institute, a training organization that brought to market technical courses previously developed by Philips Research and the Philips Centre for Fabrication Technology (CFT), and originally offered by the Philips Centre for Technical Training (CTT). Raaijmakers played an instrumental role in bringing together organizations such as Mechatronics Academy, T2Prof and Sioux, among others, that had taken over these training activities from Philips, thereby preserving this knowledge for the Brainport region.

Raaijmakers is known for his analytical reporting. His columns often challenge industry assumptions, particularly around semiconductor strategy and technological competition.

His book “ASML’s architects” took seven years to research, involved more than 300 hours of interviews and drew on conversations with more than one hundred people inside and outside the company. Reviewers such as Dan Hutcheson, Peter Clarke and Mike Maynard described it as “a thrilling tale of against-all-odds entrepreneurialism” and “a story that would be unbelievable if it were not true.”

“ASML’s architects” describes the history of ASML from the 1960s up to the company’s IPO in 1995. The book has been published in Dutch, English and Simplified Chinese. At the end of 2026, it will also be published in Taiwan in Traditional Chinese. The sequel will be published at the end of 2027 and will cover the company’s history from 1995 onwards.

In both books, people take center stage within the context of technological developments in the semiconductor industry. Raaijmakers writes primarily from a systems engineering perspective about the company’s execution power and addresses the question of how ASML succeeded in becoming the world’s most important manufacturer of chipmaking equipment.

Before ASML, there was Philips. In “Kraamkamer van ASML, NXP en de cd” [“Natlab – Cradle of ASML, NXP and the CD”] (co-authored with Paul van Gerven, 2016), Raaijmakers opened up a research world that had been closed for decades. The Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium, founded in 1914, was the birthplace of the wafer stepper that became ASML’s foundation, the chip technology that became NXP, and the compact disc, Philips’ most commercially successful product. The book doesn’t romanticize the lab; it challenges myths, including the widely celebrated idea of total academic freedom at Natlab, and gives equal weight to failures alongside breakthroughs. Reviewers praised it as one of the most accurate and colorful accounts ever written about how one of Europe’s great industrial research institutions actually worked – and how its inventions shaped the world.

Raaijmakers currently spends most of his time writing the new ASML book. In addition, for Bits&Chips, he closely follows developments in advanced packaging and curates the program for the Benelux Heterogeneous Integration Conference.