Who are Caeleste ?
Caeleste was created in 2006, by Bart Dierickx, who was the former CTO of FillFactory in Belgium and Patrick Henckes who is what you can call serial entrepreneur. We are still, owned by the founders and by the management team so we have a pretty stable ownership, which allows us to grow carefully and strategically. At the moment we are comprised of around 36 people and we ended last year with a turnover of approximately 6 million euros, we would like to grow towards 8 million euros this year.
What do you do in the vision industry?
We do not carry standard products, we only work on custom image sensor designs, from the specifications of the customers which means that we can put all our focus on what we design for the customer. That's an important feature of our company for the customer because it means that they are not second priority for us, they are really the first priority.
We are mainly focused on special or high-performance products and products with what you can call a certain twist, which means that if you can buy a standard device that satisfies your specifications from one the other exhibitors present here at the show you should buy it from them. It's only when the customer really wants to differentiate themselves from, their competitors, that we really excel and come up with an excellent alternative competitor beating product.
What specific industries do you serve within that specialised area?
We mainly serve industrial vision, the space community, for remote sensing and science missions. We are in medical fields with x-ray detectors and high-performance image sensors for various applications. We are also involved in life science with regular images sensors, single proton detectors and more generally, in silicon inspection, anyone that needs custom high-performance solutions.
What applications of your technology have you done in space?
We have designed several image sensors for remote sensing, from both low orbit and geostationary orbit. Some of the missions are very long lasting. The CTO designed the product, in 1990, whilst at IMEC, a sensor for a spectroscopic instrument, which had to fly towards one of the comets which pass by accidentally in the solar system. That mission finally ended two years ago, it was over 25 years in length, so we do deal with some demanding requirements.
Quite often, for space requirements you design products with life-times of five to eight years for a satellite they fly for six years from the first launch and for two or three generations of satellites. This means that you're always looking at very long-lasting projects and device life-times. Another issue that is specific for space is that you have radiation background which means you must harden your devices against it. Do you work with smaller companies or only larger companies such as NASA?
Yes of course but you must pay the entry ticket for a custom design. we work with companies that have five to ten people in them within very specialized niche markets as well as the big institutions.
What is your next step and next area of development?
That's partially dependent on the customer but one of the things we are looking at is, not real imaging but neural potential firing and deep-brain and deep-nerve simulation.
Besides the physical imaging, we do also read-out circuits for infrared imaging and you can consider those read-out circuits for infrared imaging, as being a massive parallel to analogue recorders. If you record the current of and infrared detector or you look at the potential changes in the neurons in the brain or set of nerves, we’ve found it’s almost the same in nature and we’re trying to create those medical interfacing chips.