!!! Press Release !!!

Aachen/Hsin-Chu, June 23 - AIXTRON is proud to announce the funding approved by the Taiwanese government to set up a new innovative R&D Center for intense production-oriented technology transfer in Taiwan. This underlines AIXTRON’s focused strategy to develop state-of-the-art volume production solutions in close collaboration with its customers. AIXTRON Taiwan has received the funding for the three-year project by Taiwan’s Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT), Ministry of Economic Affairs, along with other companies like HP (Product Development Center), Dell (Taiwan Research Center), Becker Avionics (Research Center), Sony (Design & Engineering Center). “The Technology Pioneer”, a magazine issued by the DoIT states that an important factor to select AIXTRON Taiwan for the DoIT research center program is AIXTRON’s strong commitment to collaborate with the Taiwanese industry, Universities and research organizations in the development of advanced, next generation technology.

The common goals of this commercial production-related joint R&D projects comprise:

• LED materials – quality optimization and improved yield management
• High power electronic devices – increase throughput
• High-k-dielectrics – develop production of key materials for IT Chips
• Nanotechnology - explore the potentials
• In-situ process control - cost reduction and performance tuning
• Technology and process simulation - accelerating time-to-market
• OVPD technology - enabling advanced OLED display production

With more than 20 years expertise in epitaxy technology, AIXTRON is happy to make this further major contribution to push the performance of the Taiwanese based electronic and photonic industries. AIXTRON collaborates with Taiwanese electronic industry partners for more than 10 years and also established a subsidiary in Hsin-Chu Science based Industrial Park focussing on joint R&D projects. Both AIXTRON and its customers will benefit from the global growing demand for increasingly powerful and smaller as well as more efficient electronic applications.

The many mutual benefits of this R&D center to both AIXTRON and its Taiwanese partners include:

Professor Dr. Michael Heuken, Head of the Scientific Advisory Board and Vice President of Corporate Research & Development at AIXTRON comments: "Our long-term and focused commitment to the Taiwanese Industry has been once more made clear by this latest R&D government co-operation agreement and the received funding. Our ultimate goal is to enable the Compound Semiconductor Industry and many other high-tech industries in Taiwan to achieve highest productivity whilst establishing high quality, cost-efficient production processes for electronic and photonic devices which have huge market potentials." Recently published market analysis predicts that for example the demand for Ultra-High-Brightness LEDs will grow from 1.8 billion USD in 2002 to over 4 billion USD in 2007. Within the same time frame, the demand for OLED displays will grow from approx. 50 million USD to 3 billion USD.

AIXTRON is, as verified by VLSI Research Inc., the world leading supplier of equipment for semiconductor epitaxy. Its equipment is used by a diverse range of customers worldwide to manufacture critical, advanced components such as HBTs, PHEMTs, MESFETs, Lasers, LEDs, Detectors and VCSELs used in fiber optic communications systems, wireless and mobile telephony applications, optical storage devices, illumination, signaling and lighting, as well as a range of other leading edge technologies. AIXTRON AG (FSE: AIX ISIN DE0005066203) is listed in the Prime Standard and Tec-DAX of the German stock exchange (Deutsche Börse) and is included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World and the MSCI World Index.

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© AIXTRON AG, June 23 , 2003

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