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Semiconductors & IC Design
After IonQ Buyout, SkyWater Reiterates Role as Quantum Foundry
Reported by EE Times on 24 September 2026
What it means for hiring
IonQ bought SkyWater in July, and SkyWater now says it remains an open quantum foundry. It has made quantum chips for about ten years across two 200mm fabs in Minnesota and Florida and a 300mm advanced packaging facility in Florida, offers a superconducting platform (SC250) and a photonics platform (SP90), and counts nine major quantum customers, including IonQ, PsiQuantum, Qolab and QuamCore. Its quantum lead, Mihir Bhaskar, says IonQ is treated as a customer like anyone else and that each customer's data stays with a dedicated team.
A quantum company owning a foundry is a bet that manufacturing, not physics, is now the constraint. Quantum devices need process engineers who can hold tolerances that classical chips never asked for: superconducting films, cryogenic behaviour, photonic waveguides, and packaging that survives near absolute zero. Those people sit between two industries, and there are very few of them. Europe's quantum start-ups and the fabs serving them will be competing with IonQ and SkyWater for the same process and packaging engineers, and the realistic source is conventional semiconductor process engineers who are willing to learn cryogenics.
Read the original at EE Times .
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