Cameca is a manufacturer of scientific instruments, namely material analysis instruments based on Charged particle beam ,ions, or electrons
Contents |
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[1]
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 university French laboratories: Spark Spectrometer at the beginning of the fifties, Castaing Microprobe from 1958, then Secondary Ion Analysers from 1968. Also in the early fifties 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 fifties[1].
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 sixties, there is a short-lived revival of the film business through the adventure of the Scopitone[1][2].
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 XXth century, Cameca gets a foothold in a third analytical technique, Tomographic atom probe[1].
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 the big US Carlyle Group. This last owner sold again Cameca to the US group Ametek[1].
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[1].
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 XXIst 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[3]. Cameca holds therefore the monopoly in the manufacturing of atom probe instruments