CAMECA

History

The company was founded as a subsidiary of Compagnie générale de la télégraphie sans fil (CSF), en 1929, as « Radio-cinéma » at the time of the emergence of the talkies. The job was to design and manufacture Movie projectors for big cinema screening rooms

After World War II, spurred on by Maurice Ponte, director of CSF and a future member of the French Academy of Sciences, the company manufactures scientific instruments developed in French University laboratories: The Spark Spectrometer at the beginning of the 1950s, the Castaing Microprobe from 1958, the Secondary Ion Analysers from 1968. Also in the early 1950s settles the company in the factory of Courbevoie, boulevard Saint-Denis where it will remain more than fifty years. The Spark Spectrometer was abandoned at the end of the 1950s.

The name of CAMECA, standing for Compagnie des Applications Mécaniques et Electroniques au Cinéma et à l'Atomistique was given in 1954. The business of movie projectors has been stopped soon after 1960, but in the 1960s, there is a short-lived revival of the film business through the adventure of the Scopitone.

From 1977, year of the launching of the IMS3F, CAMECA has a virtual monopoly in the field of magnetic SIMS, while it must share the market Castaing microprobe with Japanese competitors, including Jeol. Semiconductor industry is a very important outlet for magnetic SIMS. At the end of the 20th century, CAMECA gets a foothold in a third analytical technique, Tomographic atom probe.

In 1987, CAMECA left the Thomson-CSF group and was subject to a Leveraged buyout operation led by its management and its employees. In 2001, the company was sold to a small French Private equity fund, and then to another private equity fund controlled by Carlyle Group. This last owner sold again CAMECA to Ametek and Ametek subsequently merged it with Imago Scientific Instruments in 2010.

From 1975, the number of employee has been about 200. Subsidiaries were created in United States, Japan, Korea, Taïwan and Germany. These subsidiaries were engaged in commercial and maintenance activities and employ a few dozen people.

The company in 2011

In 2011, according to the website of the company, its business can be shared into two different markets: Scientific instruments dedicated to research activities and metrology for the semiconductor industry. This last market addresses semiconductor fabrication cleanrooms with a dedicated version of the Castaing electron probe based on the LEXES technique (low energy electron induced X-Ray emission spectrometry) developed at the beginning of the 21st century.

CAMECA instruments are well known in academic communities, including the fields of geochemistry and planetary science that had earned the company to be cited dozens of times in scientific journals such as Nature or Science.

In 2010, Ametek purchased the Wisconsin start-up Imago Scientific Instruments and attached it to CAMECA. CAMECA holds therefore the monopoly in the manufacturing of atom probe instruments with the LEAP brand name.