More on Azur's storied heritage
AZUR’s roots are closely linked to the more than 100 years of industrial history of AEG-Telefunken. Founded in 1964 as a part of Telefunken, it developed and manufactured solar cells for the first German satellite, AZUR, which launched in 1969.
Since that time, more than 15 million space qualified solar cells and Coverglass Interconnected Cell (CIC) assemblies, providing more than 11 MW of power to over 700 space projects have been delivered by AZUR. The cells power satellites in all Earth orbits (LEO, MEO, GEO), as well as spacecraft under environmental conditions from Mercury (HIHT) to Jupiter (LILT), without a failure or anomaly.
Intelsat, Globalstar, Hotbird, ATV, Galileo Sat, Meteosat, Glonass, GMES and OneWeb are just some of the commercial telecommunication and Earth exploration satellite programs powered by our solar cells.
In cooperation with the European Space Agency, the German Aerospace Center DLR and NASA, AZUR has developed and provided solar cells for scientific missions in deep space and to other planets, such as Hubble Space Telescope, Rosetta, Venus Express, Mars Express, Herschel-Planck, JUICE, Europa Clipper and many others.
The technologies developed by AZUR for space applications are now also used for terrestrial photovoltaics systems as well as opto- and power-electronic devices.
Technical Milestones
- 1964: Silicon space solar cell reaches 8% efficiency at AM0
- 1974: First multi-crystalline Si solar cell with 10% efficiency at AM 1.5
- 1986: High efficiency Si solar cell reaches 18% efficiency at AM0
- 1990: Ultrathin (5 µm) GaAs solar cell reaches 20% efficiency at AM0
- 2008: Triple-junction GaAs solar cell with 30% efficiency at AM0
- 2009: World record lattice-mismatched CPV GaAs triple-junction solar cell with 41.1% efficiency at AM1.5d (in cooperation with Fraunhofer ISE)
- 2012: Triple-junction solar cell with 35% efficiency at AM1.5 for terrestrial one sun applications in large-scale production
- 2017: First quadruple-junction space solar cell 4G32C with 32% beginning-of-life efficiency and 28.7% end-of-life efficiency at AM0
- 2019: Triple-junction space solar cells adapted for low-intensity low-temperature (LILT) conditions for missions to Jupiter
- 2022: First quintuple-junction solar cells 5C46 for terrestrial CPV applications