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.

[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.

[1] The name of CAMECA, standing for Compagnie des Applications Mécaniques et Electroniques au Cinéma et à l'Atomistique, was given in 1954.

[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.

[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.