Federal President of Germany Meets Heliatek Founders and Future Prize Winners

During his first official tour of Saxony, German Federal President Joachim Gauck visited the Technical University of Dresden where he met the team of scientists who founded Heliatek and won the President’s Award for Technology and Innovation – the Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Prize).

During the course of his visit to the Institute of Applied Photophysics at TU Dresden, President Gauck met the winners of the 2011 Deutscher Zukunftspreis, Dr. Martin Pfeiffer (Heliatek GmbH), Professor Karl Leo (TU Dresden / Fraunhofer COMEDD) and Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth (Novaled AG). They were recognized for their outstanding research results on organic semiconductors and for the successful commercial exploitation of their findings. The annual award is worth €250,000 to the winners.

“We feel very happy about the high interest shown by President Gauck towards our technology,” said Dr. Pfeiffer, chief technology officer of Heliatek. “It is a big inducement for us to follow our goal to produce solar films, which are light weight, flexible, optionally transparent and fulfill a high aesthetic quality for diverse applications. The German Future Prize is very special for us, because it awards the entrepreneurial initiative, the power of endurance and the interdisciplinary work, which led to the founding of a company in Dresden that has gained worldwide technology leadership for organic solar films.”

The work done by Dr. Pfeiffer, Prof. Leo and Dr. Blochwitz-Nimoth has helped to drive forward progress in the entire field of organic electronics. In their laboratories at Dresden Technical University, the three scientists developed a technology for organic semiconductors that facilitates the production of innovative and efficient components, including organic photovoltaic cells with significantly enhanced efficiency, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with dramatically reduced energy consumption and a longer lifetime.

With the founding of Heliatek GmbH and Novaled AG, the team which first came together at TU Dresden has established a leading organic electronics cluster in Saxony, Germany. Heliatek currently holds the world record for organic photovoltaic with a cell efficiency of 12%. The company has opened the first factory of its kind in the world for the production of solar film in a continuous roll-to-roll process under vacuum conditions. Heliatek is working with prominent partners in the building and construction material and the automotive industry towards the market launch of its flexible organic Solar Film.

The key to Heliatek’s success is the family of small organic molecules – oligomers – developed and synthesized at its own lab in Ulm, Germany. Heliatek is the only solar company in the world that uses the deposition of small organic molecules in a low temperature, roll-to-roll vacuum process. Its solar tandem cells are made of nanometers-thin layers of high purity and uniformity.