!!! Press Release !!!

Aachen/Berlin, Germany, 2 June, 2004 - The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) has announced the funding of a joint research project on organic solar cells by the renowned German Hahn-Meitner-Institute (HMI), the chemicals supplier Covion Organic Semiconductors GmbH and AIXTRON AG. Within this project AIXTRON will install an Organic Vapor Phase Deposition (OVPD) System at the HMI for the deposition of organic thin films.

Photovoltaics offer an environmentally sound local supply of Energy independent of fossil fuels. Organic materials appear to be a promising candidate for application in low cost thin film solar cells. First samples have achieved conversion efficiency of more than 5 %; in the mid to long-term it is expected that organic solar cells achieve even higher efficiencies than Si thin film solar cells. Some key advantages of organic solar cells are

• Low manufacturing cost
• Utilization of eco friendly materials
• Application to transparent and flexible substrates
• Scalable manufacturing processes for large area

Professor Martha Lux-Steiner of Hahn-Meitner-Institute comments: "This government project gives us the opportunity to foster our research on organic thin film solar cells with industrial relevance using AIXTRON's OVPD technology. Process scalability to industrial requirements and low manufacturing cost are as important as the device performance to make organic solar cells a viable future technology."

Professor Michael Heuken, Vice President for R&D at AIXTRON adds: "We are very pleased to co-operate with renowned partners such as the HMI and Covion. Basic research is crucial for AIXTRON's development to continually improve our equipment for new high potential technologies such as the organic solar cell."

OVPD^® technology has been exclusively licensed to AIXTRON from Universal Display Corporation (UDC), Ewing, N.J. USA for equipment manufacture. OVPD^® technology is based on an invention by Professor Stephen R. Forrest et. al. at Princeton University, USA, which was exclusively licensed to UDC. AIXTRON and UDC have jointly developed and qualified OVPD^® pre-production equipment.

AIXTRON, the leading supplier of production equipment for compound semiconductor devices, announced in 2000 the start of its Organic Vapor Phase Deposition (OVPD) business to address the markets of OLED and other organic semiconductor devices. Based on an exclusive licensing agreement and a joint development program with Universal Display Corp. AIXTRON has developed an innovative low cost, superior high-throughput process, fully tailored to the needs of high-end device mass production like high resolution full-color OLED displays. 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 MSCI World Index.

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© AIXTRON AG, June 2, 2004

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