PsiQuantum Expands Relationship with Skywater Technologies for Production of Silicon Photonic Chips

Sky Water Technology is a US-owned semiconductor manufacturer located in Bloomington, Minnesota that provides wafer casting services for a variety of device categories including mixed-signal CMOS, ROIC, rad-hard ICs, power management, MEMS, superconducting ICs, photonics, carbon nanotubes, and interposers. One of their old quantum clients is D-Wave who have used SkyWater foundries for years to manufacture the superconducting chips they use in their quantum annealing. Now PsiQuantum has selected them to manufacture silicon photonic chips for their photonic-based quantum computers.

This came as a bit of a surprise to us because PsiQuantum has been working with GlobalFoundries and the two companies last year received a grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) of $25 million to accelerate additional investment in new capabilities at the GlobalFoundries plant. It is not yet clear whether SkyWater will be used as an additional production source for PsiQuantum in addition to GlobalFoundries or whether they will take over most of the processing work. We should point out that SkyWater uses 200 mm wafers whereas GlobalFoundries uses 300 mm wafers. Although manufacturing processes can be developed to run on any wafer size, minor adjustments are usually required to change the process from one wafer size to another.

Additional information is available in a press release available on the SkyWater website Here.

May 6, 2023