SkyWater commissions SkyTech Center to accelerate custom process technology development

SkyWater Technology Foundry of Bloomington, MN, USA – a solely US-owned Trusted Foundry that manufactures differentiated integrated circuits in markets including aerospace & defense, automotive, cloud & computing, consumer, industrial, the Internet of Things (IoT) and medical – has announced its new SkyTech Center as an expansion of its operations to enhance advanced processing capabilities at its US-based manufacturing facility.

SkyWater says that it sees a growing industry need for custom process development and has made a strategic investment to repurpose cleanroom space previously used for testing to lay the ground for further company growth and new customer engagement. The SkyTech Center will also serve as the environment where critical tasks supporting DARPA’s 3DSoC (Three-Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip) ERI (Electronics Resurgence Initiative) program will be performed, including carbon nanotube (CNT) deposition and lift-off metallization.

SkyWater says that its Technology Foundry model is filling an industry need for new device topologies that are capable of being produced at scale and are not available in traditional foundry manufacturing facilities. The new SkyTech Center allows customers to develop in a quality-focused fab environment that enables faster processing and ramp to volume production. It also accommodates customers who want to place their own dedicated tools in SkyWater’s facility, enabling development embedded in a fab ecosystem, co-located with other capabilities needed to streamline commercialization.

“The unique aspects of this investment, coupled with SkyWater’s 200mm manufacturing infrastructure, provides an ideal environment to enable emerging novel technologies to quickly transition to manufacturable products at the right scale,” comments Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Market Research.

“Our Custom Foundry business grew approximately 50% in 2018 and is tracking at that same rate for 2019, reinforcing the trend we see in the market for advanced process development activities for an increasingly diverse field of high-technology devices,” notes SkyWater’s president Thomas Sonderman. “The addition of the SkyTech Center is an example of investments we are making to enable capabilities in which we see a growing demand as the industry transitions to a new era of hybrid architectures.”

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Tags: Silicon photonics

Visit: www.skywatertechnology.com