 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | scientific instruments |
| Headquarters | , France  |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Website | cameca.com/ |
CAMECA is a manufacturer of scientific instruments, namely material analysis instruments based on charged particle beam, ions, or electrons.
The company was founded as a subsidiary of Compagnie générale de la télégraphie sans fil (CSF), in 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 manufactured scientific instruments developed in French University laboratories: the Spark Spectrometer at the beginning of the 1950s, the Castaing Microprobe from 1958, and Secondary Ion Analysers from 1968. Also in the early 1950s the company settled the factory in Courbevoie, boulevard Saint-Denis where it remained for more than fifty years. The Spark Spectrometer was abandoned at the end of the 1950s. [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 stopped soon after 1960, but in the 1960s there was a short-lived revival of the film business through the adventure of the Scopitone. [1] [2]
Since 1977, the year that the IMS3F was launched, CAMECA has had a virtual monopoly in the field of magnetic SIMS, but it shares the market for Castaing microprobe with Japanese competitors, including Jeol. The semiconductor industry is a very important outlet for magnetic SIMS. At the end of the 20th century, CAMECA gained 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 by its management and employees. In 2001, the company was sold to a small French private equity fund, and then to another private equity fund controlled by the Carlyle Group, which sold CAMECA to Ametek, which merged CAMECA with Imago Scientific Instruments in 2010. [1]
From 1975, the number of employees has been about 200. Subsidiaries were created in the United States, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany. These subsidiaries engaged in commercial and maintenance activities and employ a few dozen people. [1]
According to the website of the company, in 2011 its business was in two different markets: scientific instruments dedicated to research activities; and metrology for the semiconductor industry. The latter 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, and CAMECA has been cited dozens of times in scientific journals such as Nature and Science.
In 2010, Ametek purchased the Wisconsin start-up Imago Scientific Instruments and attached it to CAMECA. [3] CAMECA therefore holds the monopoly in the manufacturing of atom probe instruments with the LEAP brand name.
The atom probe was introduced at the 14th Field Emission Symposium in 1967 by Erwin Wilhelm Müller and J. A. Panitz. It combined a field ion microscope with a mass spectrometer having a single particle detection capability and, for the first time, an instrument could “... determine the nature of one single atom seen on a metal surface and selected from neighboring atoms at the discretion of the observer”.
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that is used to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. The results are presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-to-charge ratio. Mass spectrometry is used in many different fields and is applied to pure samples as well as complex mixtures.
An ion source is a device that creates atomic and molecular ions. Ion sources are used to form ions for mass spectrometers, optical emission spectrometers, particle accelerators, ion implanters and ion engines.
Plasma diagnostics are a pool of methods, instruments, and experimental techniques used to measure properties of a plasma, such as plasma components' density, distribution function over energy (temperature), their spatial profiles and dynamics, which enable to derive plasma parameters.
Secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) is a technique used to analyze the composition of solid surfaces and thin films by sputtering the surface of the specimen with a focused primary ion beam and collecting and analyzing ejected secondary ions. The mass/charge ratios of these secondary ions are measured with a mass spectrometer to determine the elemental, isotopic, or molecular composition of the surface to a depth of 1 to 2 nm. Due to the large variation in ionization probabilities among elements sputtered from different materials, comparison against well-calibrated standards is necessary to achieve accurate quantitative results. SIMS is the most sensitive surface analysis technique, with elemental detection limits ranging from parts per million to parts per billion.
X-ray spectroscopy is a general term for several spectroscopic techniques for characterization of materials by using x-ray radiation.
A microprobe is an instrument that applies a stable and well-focused beam of charged particles to a sample.
The sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe is a large-diameter, double-focusing secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) sector instrument that was produced by Australian Scientific Instruments in Canberra, Australia and now has been taken over by Chinese company Dunyi Technology Development Co. (DTDC) in Beijing. Similar to the IMS 1270-1280-1300 large-geometry ion microprobes produced by CAMECA, Gennevilliers, France and like other SIMS instruments, the SHRIMP microprobe bombards a sample under vacuum with a beam of primary ions that sputters secondary ions that are focused, filtered, and measured according to their energy and mass.
An electron microprobe (EMP), also known as an electron probe microanalyzer (EPMA) or electron micro probe analyzer (EMPA), is an analytical tool used to non-destructively determine the chemical composition of small volumes of solid materials. It works similarly to a scanning electron microscope: the sample is bombarded with an electron beam, emitting x-rays at wavelengths characteristic to the elements being analyzed. This enables the abundances of elements present within small sample volumes to be determined, when a conventional accelerating voltage of 15-20 kV is used. The concentrations of elements from lithium to plutonium may be measured at levels as low as 100 parts per million (ppm), material dependent, although with care, levels below 10 ppm are possible. The ability to quantify lithium by EPMA became a reality in 2008.
Focused ion beam, also known as FIB, is a technique used particularly in the semiconductor industry, materials science and increasingly in the biological field for site-specific analysis, deposition, and ablation of materials. A FIB setup is a scientific instrument that resembles a scanning electron microscope (SEM). However, while the SEM uses a focused beam of electrons to image the sample in the chamber, a FIB setup uses a focused beam of ions instead. FIB can also be incorporated in a system with both electron and ion beam columns, allowing the same feature to be investigated using either of the beams. FIB should not be confused with using a beam of focused ions for direct write lithography. These are generally quite different systems where the material is modified by other mechanisms.
Isotope-ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) is a specialization of mass spectrometry, in which mass spectrometric methods are used to measure the relative abundance of isotopes in a given sample.
JEOL, Ltd. is a major developer and manufacturer of electron microscopes and other scientific instruments, industrial equipment and medical equipment.
Static secondary-ion mass spectrometry, or static SIMS is a secondary ion mass spectrometry technique for chemical analysis including elemental composition and chemical structure of the uppermost atomic or molecular layer of a solid which may be a metal, semiconductor or plastic with insignificant disturbance to its composition and structure. It is one of the two principal modes of operation of SIMS, which is the mass spectrometry of ionized particles emitted by a solid surface upon bombardment by energetic primary particles.
Imago Scientific Instruments was a company founded in 1999 by Dr. Tom Kelly. At that time he was the Director of the Materials Science Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but left his tenured position in 2001 to guide the company's growth.
AMETEK, Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate and global designer and manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with headquarters in the United States and over 220 sites worldwide.
NanoSIMS is an analytical instrument manufactured by CAMECA which operates on the principle of secondary ion mass spectrometry. The NanoSIMS is used to acquire nanoscale resolution measurements of the elemental and isotopic composition of a sample. The NanoSIMS is able to create nanoscale maps of elemental or isotopic distribution, parallel acquisition of up to seven masses, isotopic identification, high mass resolution, subparts-per-million sensitivity with spatial resolution down to 50 nm.
A spectrometer is a scientific instrument used to separate and measure spectral components of a physical phenomenon. Spectrometer is a broad term often used to describe instruments that measure a continuous variable of a phenomenon where the spectral components are somehow mixed. In visible light a spectrometer can separate white light and measure individual narrow bands of color, called a spectrum. A mass spectrometer measures the spectrum of the masses of the atoms or molecules present in a gas. The first spectrometers were used to split light into an array of separate colors. Spectrometers were developed in early studies of physics, astronomy, and chemistry. The capability of spectroscopy to determine chemical composition drove its advancement and continues to be one of its primary uses. Spectrometers are used in astronomy to analyze the chemical composition of stars and planets, and spectrometers gather data on the origin of the universe.
The Compagnie générale de la télégraphie sans fil was a French company founded in 1918 during a reorganization and expansion of the Société française radio-électrique (SFR), which became a subsidiary. The company developed technology for radio-telegraphy, radio program transmission, radar, television and other applications. It provided broadcasting and telegraphy services, and sold its equipment throughout the French colonial empire and in many other parts of the world. In 1968 CSF merged with the Thomson-Brandt to form Thomson-CSF.
Raimond Bernard René Castaing, also spelt as Raymond Castaing, was a French solid state physicist and inventor of various materials characterization methods. He was the founder of the French school of microanalysis and is referred to as the father of microanalysis.