Major Tool & Machine expanding capacity in microchips industry
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Indianapolis-based manufacturer Major Tool & Machine Inc. is in the midst of a $21 million expansion that will dramatically boost its production capacity for the microchip industry.
The expansion will add another 51,000 square feet of building space to the southwest corner of MTM’s existing 620,000-square-foot facility at 1458 E. 19th St. on the city’s northeast side. Groundbreaking for the project was in January. MTM says it expects to have construction complete by April 2024, followed by equipment and clean room installations that will continue until 2025.
MTM, which specializes in metal fabrication and machining, serves customers in a variety of industries including aerospace, defense, energy and semiconductors, among others. The company has about 420 employees. Its corporate parent is Maine-based Precinmac Precision Machining, which acquired MTM in 2021.
MTM Associate Director of Engineering Tony Malito said the expansion will allow the company to produce a higher volume of the components it makes for a single customer in the semiconductor industry.
The customer is ramping up production for a type of microchip production equipment that uses extreme ultraviolet light, or EUV, lithography to etch patterns on microchips, Malito said.
Malito declined to publicly identify the customer. But ASML Holding N.V., a Netherlands-based maker of microchip production equipment, is the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography systems, according to ASML’s website. ASML has been an MTM customer since 2018. A phone message left with ASML on Thursday afternoon was not immediately returned.
ASML makes equipment that chipmakers like Intel use to produce the microchips used in everything from computers to cell phones to medical devices. In a presentation to investors last fall, ASML said it is working to ramp up its production over the next several years to keep up with projected demand from its customers.
The EUV technology allows chipmakers to etch more tightly-patterned microchips that can operate faster and use less power than chips made without the technology.
Microchip production requires adherence to extreme precision and cleanliness standards—which is also the case for suppliers like MTM, Malito said.
As an example, one of the parts that MTM makes for ASML is an aluminum part that weighs roughly 12,500 pounds and is roughly as wide and long as a pickup truck. The tolerance on that part is 50 microns, meaning that the actual dimensions of the part can vary no more than 50 microns from the dimensions specified in the design. As a point of comparison, a human hair is about 70 microns in diameter.
“What we’re doing is some of the most complex tight-tolerance machining work that we’ve ever done as a company on this scale,” Malito said.
The MTM expansion will also add a 12,000-square-foot clean room, doubling the company’s current clean room space.
Before parts can be shipped, Malito said, they must be pressure-washed, inspected, vacuum-baked and specially packed for shipping to make sure they meet the customer’s cleanliness standards upon arrival.
Clean-room manufacturing is not something MTM had experience with until the last few years, Malito said. “It’s a very interesting, very unique process. And it’s something that this company had no exposure to, really, prior to 2021.”
MTM installed its first clean room in 2020 to support ASML and began producing parts for the company the following year.