CAEN is one of the most important spin-offs of the Italian Nuclear Physics Research Institute and it was founded in Viareggio in 1979. CAEN designs and manufactures sophisticated electronic equipment for nuclear physics research and is today among the world’s leading companies in the field: there are hundreds of thousand CAEN Low/High Voltage and data acquisition channels now working in all most important Nuclear Physics Laboratories.

Over the years, CAEN has diversified its offer, extending its market, taking part into national and international programs and becoming a real “Innovation Company”. In this way CAEN added to its core business new experiences such as UHF RFID, microelectronics, aerospace, biomed, and homeland security.

CAEN is known today as the only company in the world able to offer, besides a complete range of power supply and data acquisition systems, a large choice of Front-End modules implemented using ASICs internally developed, totaling more than 250 catalogue products. However, this number is not exhaustive: part of CAEN production is custom designed for Big Science. One of the main users is CERN, which hosts the LHC and where ATLAS and CMS experiments have recently demonstrated the existence of the particle known as the "Higgs boson".  This demonstration culminated with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics 2013 to Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs.

CAEN counts on more than 30 electronic engineers and physics PhDs are taking to the next level the technological content and pushing forward innovation, proudly delivering “Tools for discovery”.