Over the years Nikhef has always had a leading role in the development of front-end electronics. A lot of the experience gathered for many of the high energy physics experiments at CERN (LEP) and DESY (HERA) and others has been used to develop read-out systems for the medipix family of chips designed at CERN since the late 1990's. 

The initial work was done on the Medipix Universal Read-Out System (MUROS), later initiatives on chip-boards were developed and with the money available for the Relaxd project the aim has shifted to high-speed read-out systems.