Star products from Germany
Products designed and made in Germany that defined their category or are used around the world, with the engineering story behind each one.
5 products
AIXTRON MOCVD systems
Deposition systems from Herzogenrath that grow thin layers of compound semiconductors on wafers, used for LEDs, lasers and power electronics.
Infineon CoolMOS
High-voltage power MOSFETs released in 1998, the first commercial products based on the superjunction principle, which cut losses in power supplies.
Q.ANT Native Processing Unit (NPU)
Photonic co-processor on thin-film lithium niobate that performs AI matrix maths with light; second generation runs at LRZ and Jülich and is coming to IONOS cloud.
TRUMPF EUV drive laser
A high-power CO2 laser system that fires 50,000 pulses a second at tin droplets, creating the plasma that emits the light used in EUV chipmaking.
ZEISS EUV lithography optics
The mirror systems inside every ASML EUV scanner, built by ZEISS SMT to steer 13.5 nm light onto silicon wafers with near-atomic precision.
Product stories
The German inside: what Germany builds into your car, your flight and the data centre
Your car may be Japanese or Italian, your airliner Airbus or Boeing. Inside both, and in the data centres behind them, sit German gearboxes, seals, bearings, chips, turbines, landing gear and racks.
Germany's strangest world champions: the small firms that quietly own odd niches
Ship propellers from a lake town, Christmas stars from a church village, the trolley sketched on a flight home. A tour of German niche champions and the stories behind them.
Inside your smartphone: the German parts nobody sees
No phone sold today carries a German brand of note, yet German sensors, liquid crystals, glass and silicon sit inside a great many of them. A walk up the supply chain, from Reutlingen to Burghausen.
Mittelstand icons: Thermomix, Playmobil, HARIBO and Steiff, and what keeps them German
Four beloved consumer brands, four family-shaped histories. Their products are global, and some are now largely made abroad. So what is German about them? Ownership, headquarters and a habit of patience.
Medtech made in Germany: scanners, ventilators, prosthetics and the lab bench
From imaging in Erlangen to anaesthesia in Lübeck, prosthetics in Duderstadt and lab equipment in Hamburg and Göttingen, German firms supply much of modern medicine's hardware.
The energy transition's hardware: turbines, inverters and electrolysers made in Germany
Wind turbines from Aurich and Rostock, solar inverters from northern Hesse, electrolysers from Dresden and grid equipment from Siemens Energy. Who builds the physical kit of decarbonisation.
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