Aachen/Germany, February 29, 2012 - AIXTRON SE today announced that its existing customer Epistar, a leading manufacturer of optoelectronic materials and devices in Taiwan, has received its first CRIUS II-XL system in a 19x4-inch wafer configuration. It will use the system to mass produce ultra-high brightness (UHB) blue and white LEDs.

The CRIUS II-XL system has successfully passed the process demonstration and acceptance test. In line with their usual procedure, Epistar will now further qualify the system in mass production. Epistar plan to purchase more CRIUS II-XL systems, when they expand their production capacity.  
Dr. Ming-Jiunn Jou, President of Epistar, comments, "Looking at this first tool, I can see that the CRIUS II-XL will make a huge difference to our productivity. Epistar has always had great confidence in AIXTRON technology and, thanks to its seamless process compatibility with our earlier generation reactors, the latest CRIUS technology is set to rapidly and efficiently drive forward future capacity expansion and technology advances."

Dr. Bernd Schulte, COO of AIXTRON, adds, "With the purchase of our latest system, the CRIUS II-XL, Epistar continues to pursue its cutting-edge production and engineering innovation in epitaxial growth. The CRIUS II-XL design concept offers the largest productivity with best-in-class uniformities, which massively increases yield and directly translates into enhanced competitiveness for Epistar's products in an ever demanding marketplace."

Located at the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park in Taiwan, Epistar Corporation has for over a decade been focused on the development, manufacture and marketing of UHB LED products. Employing its proprietary MOCVD process technology, Epistar continues to successfully commercialize a full range of UHB LEDs worldwide, featuring low power consumption and long operation life.

Introduced in November 2011, the AIXTRON CRIUS II-XL configuration offers an outstanding reactor capacity as high as 19x4 inch, which represents a capacity increase of 46% compared to the original CRIUS II, giving it the highest throughput and lowest cost of ownership in the whole LED industry.

The term CRIUS® is a registered trademark.