Making Small Look Big

Employees constructing machines at St. Petersburg-based Plasma-Therm LLC look more like nurses than manufacturers. The workers wear caps and protective masks while fine-tuning the firm's machines, which will eventually produce microchips 200-square-microns in diameter.

Hence the uniforms. The microprocessors produced by Plasma-Therm's machines are so small that a human-hair-sized defect could render one of the machines, which sell for as much as $6 million, unusable to its customer, who could include one the suppliers of Apple or Nokia. “The human body is the largest source of contaminants,” explains CEO Abdul Lateef.

There have been few mistakes at Plasma-Therm, Lateef says. In fact, he says the company experienced 58% growth in annual revenues in 2011 compared with 2010. And it had a 67% growth in revenues from the previous year. “That's huge,” Lateef exclaims. Lateef declines to disclose Plasma-Therm's revenues as a private company, but in a 2010 article he said the firm averaged about $50 million annually during the previous 10 years. Lateef also says the company employs more than 100 workers, although he would not disclose an exact number.