SkyWater CEO Tom Sonderman told EE Times in an exclusive interview that his company is emerging as the “quantum foundry” just as TSMC has become the AI foundry for Nvidia and AMD.
SkyWater’s quantum-computing customers, which include D-Wave and PsiQuantum, are roughly doubling to seven this year, Sonderman told EE Times.
“We’re bringing what we call the quantum foundry—our technology-as-a-service model—to the market at a time when innovators are breaking through the quantum barrier to taking this out of the lab into a more high-scale environment,” Sonderman said. “We’re in a good spot with the capabilities we’ve built over several years with companies like PsiQuantum and D-Wave. They provide a great foundation as we bring more companies into our ecosystem.”
SkyWater deals with an array of quantum technologies. One of the company’s latest customers, SQC (Silicon Quantum Computing), is making spin-based qubits. D-Wave is doing quantum annealing. Another SkyWater partner announced this month, QuamCore, is making a quantum processor through large-scale integration, Sonderman said.
QuamCore, the pioneer of a superconducting quantum processor, has signed a multi-million-dollar contract with SkyWater focused on developing single flux quantum devices.
In March, PsiQuantum expanded its partnership with SkyWater to produce silicon photonic chips. The engagement supports PsiQuantum’s goal to deliver a commercially viable, error-corrected general-purpose quantum computer that scales beyond 1,000,000 qubits using silicon photonics.
Also in March, D-Wave and SkyWater claimed a historic milestone by demonstrating quantum supremacy in simulation with an article in Science that validated annealing quantum computing for real-world problems.
Quantum foundry
Sonderman says he has won quantum clients through SkyWater’s technology-as-a-service environment that is conducive to collaborative innovation.
“That results in custom technology development,” he said. “One thing about quantum right now is there’s a lot of different solutions that are attacking the quantum problem and having the flexibility to come into a foundry environment.”
Quantum companies like PsiQuantum have raised billions of dollars in recent months. Sonderman believes much of the money they spend will be to make the core capabilities that demonstrate quantum outcomes.
“All the modalities that companies are interested in pursuing, we can offer a solution to,” Sonderman added. “That’s what makes it unique. We have the flexibility that customers are looking for, but we’re also able to leverage a lot of our core capabilities to make these innovations happen at a faster pace.”
Entire architectures for quantum systems need to be created, noted SkyWater Senior VP Ross Miller.
“Each of them is different, whether it’s superconducting, or ion trapping, or spin-based, or others, but they all require microfabrication technology,” Miller said. “For some of them, it’s core processor units that we’re helping to fabricate. In others, it’s some of the peripheral microelectronics or superconducting architectures that surround some of their core processors.”
A lot of the quantum devices are done in a hybrid fashion.
“We would do a piece, maybe other people would do a piece,” Sonderman added. “But our virtual IDM approach is to not only do the front end, but we do the back end. By linking all those under a single supplier like SkyWater, the companies we work with, the design companies, it reduces not only their risk, but it allows them to solve problems quicker than when they’re dealing with multiple suppliers.”
Cryogenic chips
SkyWater makes microelectronics for the U.S. government that need cryogenic solutions, Sonderman said.
“We’re able to apply that to the quantum space as well,” he said. “Many applications operate at the millikelvin level.”
AI has soared because TSMC is the foundry for the top AI design companies, according to Sonderman.
“That’s essentially what we’re doing here with quantum in the U.S.,” he added. “We’re not only leveraging our relationship with the U.S. government—trusted manufacturing, compartmentalization of information, really protecting IP at its most stringent level—but also bringing a foundry capability to the quantum space so that these companies can leverage their investments in a way that maximizes the ROI.”
SkyWater is more than doubling its sales with the acquisition of a Texas fab from customer Infineon earlier this year. The older part of SkyWater that does not include the Infineon fab acquisition is likely to see revenues from its Advanced Compute business, which is primarily quantum, grow from about 10% in 2024 to about 15% in 2025, according to the company.
The new quantum business will grow by about 30% annually, leading SkyWater’s corporate growth rate, according to Sonderman.
Growth drivers
Aerospace and defense have been the mainstay of SkyWater’s business, but Sonderman expects quantum and advanced packaging to be new growth drivers.
The SkyWater CEO sees a chance to become an advanced-packaging leader.
“Advanced packaging is tied to a program we announced back in January of 2024 that involved standing up a fan-out wafer-packaging solution. For the first time, SkyWater is seeing significant contributions out of Florida with our advanced packaging,” Sonderman added. “Those solutions just don’t exist in the United States.”
For example, TSMC’s new fabs in Arizona have started making chips for customers like Nvidia, but the finished wafers still need to be shipped over the Pacific to Asia for packaging.
Advanced packaging will be a forward-looking strategy for a lot of the innovation in quantum, but also innovation in the U.S., Sonderman noted.
“Other than what Intel, TSMC and Samsung may offer at the extreme nodes, there’s really no one else offering advanced-packaging solutions for the broader community,” he added. “SkyWater firmly believes we can be the leader in advanced packaging as this decade unfolds. The U.S. should have a commitment to be the leader in advanced packaging as well because it’s really a chance now to reclaim the mantle of technology leadership but also because it’s going to be foundational to things like quantum.”
CHIPS Act
In hindsight, Sonderman said the U.S. CHIPS Act helped to build more than enough new chip fabs in the U.S. but failed to close a larger vulnerability in the domestic semiconductor supply chain: advanced packaging.
“There was very little talk about moving more advanced packaging to the U.S.,” he noted. “You don’t see a lot of OSATs other than Amkor talking about coming back to the U.S. That’s an area where SkyWater is going to lean into. We plan on being the leader in open-source advanced packaging.”
Top-two global chip packager Amkor told EE Times its first advanced-packaging facility in the U.S., located near TSMC Arizona, will start production in early 2028. That is after Apple, TSMC and Amkor announced a joint advanced packaging effort in December 2023. Most of the world’s chip-packaging capacity is in Asia.
In March this year, TSMC announced it would add $100 billion to its investment in the U.S., an expansion that would build three new chip fabs and two advanced-packaging facilities separate from Amkor at TSMC’s existing fab complex near Phoenix, Arizona.
America’s foundry
Sonderman said he is proving the mission that SkyWater has set out for, which is to be America’s foundry, and to secure America’s silicon foundation.
“We don’t really have a foundry industry in the U.S,” he said. “We have pockets of it, but other than SkyWater, the entities are either not pure play, like Intel, or they are foreign controlled, like GlobalFoundries, Tower and X-Fab.”
SkyWater can build a robust foundry capability in the U.S. without constructing new greenfield fabs, Sonderman said, specifically regarding the Infineon fab acquisition.
“The real investment in future greenfield should be around advanced packaging and specifically panel-related advanced packaging because that’s where the industry’s going. It’s how we can not only ensure that we don’t just make the chips here, but we package and actually produce them holistically within the U.S.”
E-beam front-runner
SkyWater sometimes makes audacious leaps. The company is the only one so far to buy an e-beam tool from Multibeam for direct writing chip designs on a silicon wafer without a mask.
“It’s a great collaboration,” Sonderman said. “The premise is very much aligned with our advanced-packaging strategy.”
The tool is also uniquely suited for quantum, he added.
“It’s early stage. First, you make the technology work, and then, you gotta make it productive. One of the unique things about our model is that we can be working with [Lam Research founder] David Lam and that group on a futuristic tool like the Multibeam platform while at the same time running volume for Infineon all in the same fab. We use a direct-write approach for our advanced-packaging solution, and having a faster platform to achieve that outcome, I think, is going to be critical.”