For want of techs: UltraSource seeks 20 workers to keep expanding

Created on Wednesday, 29 December 2010 13:05

By David Brooks
Staff Writer
The Nashua Telegraph

NASHUA, NH - Money is tight, some raw materials are in short supply (got any synthetic sapphire lying around?) and the push to lower costs and improve technology is unrelenting.

But none of those is the biggest obstacle facing UltraSource, a Hollis fabricator of specialty microchips, as it continues its recent growth.

Finding people with manufacturing expertise - that's the problem.

"Ten, 15 years ago you'd run an ad looking for production control, a manufacturing manager, and you'd get all sorts of responses. But as jobs went away, those people went into other industries, and today you don't get nearly as many," said Michael Casper, CEO and founder of UltraSource, which sells about $12 million in specialty chips to military and commercial firms for such tasks as credit card readers and military infrared detectors, with an emphasis on wireless telecommunications and military microwave markets.

"That's a real testimony to manufacturing going elsewhere. It is the big challenge."

UltraSource has about 90 employees and is looking for about 20 more as it prepares to keep expanding, fueled by a new business process that guarantees creation of prototype devices in as little as four days from initial design - considerably faster than usual.

This process, called UltraFast, has led to about 25 sales in the past six months, and UltraSource hopes for many more to come.

Hence the push for employees. "You need to hire ahead of the business," notes Casper.

The difficulty isn't necessarily shortages of specific sets of skills on a certain device, but rather, to find people with the habits and basic knowledge acquired when you're part of the long, complex process of turning an idea into a device on time and on budget via clean-room or lean-manufacturing process.

"A very high level of attention to detail is needed," said Douglas Cobb, director of finance and accounting.

The company's need is so great that Casper says he's thinking about following in the footsteps of Hypertherm. The Hanover-based company had such trouble finding trained machinists that it established the Hypertherm Technical Training Institute in 2008.

The $2 million facility, created in partnership with a nonprofit called Vermont High Tech and with nearby River Valley Community College, offers 10-week courses in various computer-controlled machinery that can also lead to 28 weeks of college credit toward an associates degree. In two years, a couple of hundred unemployed or underemployed people have been trained, and another 50 or so employees of other firms have gotten training to increase their skills.

"We're starting to talk about doing something like that," Casper said.

This need has led UltraSource to an unusual publicity blitz, reaching out in ways that, among other things, helped lead to this story. The push will culminate Jan. 4 in unveiling a billboard alongside the escalators in Manchester Boston Regional Airport, which for the business community is one of the highest-profile locations in New Hampshire.

The push isn't designed to lure customers, although that would be nice, but to lure employees.

Casper founded UltraSource in 1991, and in 1997 moved to a small industrial park in Hollis, off Route 111 near the Nashua and Massachusetts lines. Until the recruiting push forced its hand, UltraSource has happily thrived as one of the scores, maybe hundreds, of small high-tech companies that exist anonymously throughout the Nashua region.

UltraSource is a "merchant fab," as in fabricator, an industry term for firms that make chips for other companies to put in their devices. The chips, usually no bigger than a thumbnail, are made by placing extremely thin films of metal - barely an atom thick, at times - onto a base, or substrate, of ceramic or silicon in complex patterns that carry currents or signals as needed.

This process is at the heart of the computer revolution, since it's a variant of how semiconductors are made, but UltraSource builds specialized chips on order in lots as small as one or two, and as many as a million, although runs of 300 to 30,000 are most typical. The company doesn't design the chips; its value is the ability to take an engineer's idea and turn it into a high-quality component in a short time at prices running from $1.50 to around $1,000 each, depending on complexity, run size and other factors.

To the laymen's eye, the chips are mind-bogglingly complicated, as are the machines used to build them.

Ceramic must be cut with diamond saws or carbon-dioxide lasers. One cutting device has a saw blade only as thick as two human hairs that spins a staggering 30,000 revolutions per minute. Another uses machine vision to control the cutting patterns and make cuts with a tolerance of 500 millionths of an inch - half as thick as one hair.

Then there's the half-million-dollar device, about the size of a garden shed, that carries the odd title of "sputtering machine." This refers to a process by which metals such as gold are placed on silicon an atom at a time: Atoms are knocked off via collisions with other particles, and float down through a vacuum to very precise target locations.

Casper, 47, founded UltraSource partly because he had seen his father establish a printed-circuitboard company, and partly because he worked in the tech industry after getting a mechanical engineering degree and saw a need.

The company has been bootstrapped ever since, growing with his funds, and Casper remains its sole owner and shareholder. UltraSource has had its ups and downs but has been growing "methodically" in recent years despite the recession, says Casper, largely due to growth in wireless devices, since the company specializes in working with high-frequency devices.

The company's future looks bright thanks to the success of UltraFast in creating speedy prototype chips, which often means snagging the production run as well. UltraSource has plenty of room to expand in Hollis, since it bought the other half of its 25,000 - square-foot building when the tenant went out of business.

"We have room to double sales here, and I expect to," he said.

If he can find enough of the right employees, that is.

David Brooks can be reached at (603)594-5831 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.