https://www.fudzilla.com/news/proces...foundry-player

We had a chance to chat with the Tom Sonderman, the president of SkyWater - a new/old US owned and operated semiconductor Fab. These guys can make a lot of interesting IoT, automotive and even quantum processing units and what makes it unique is that it is US owned and operated.

The company was spun out from Cypress manufacturing and has a similar business model to the AMD/GlobalFoundries play. Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is still the biggest customer for SkyWater but the SkyWater manufacturing fabs are bringing in a number of new customers.

In October last year it hired manufacturing industry veteran Thomas Sonderman as the company president. Sonderman comes from the long history and executive roles at GlobalFoundries where he was vice president of manufacturing technology, and, before that AMD. He played a key role in the formation of GlobalFoundries and separating AMD?s manufacturing fabs from the main business that essentially saved the existence of AMD. Before joining SkyWater, Sonderman was the group vice president and general manager for Rudolph Technologies' Integrated Solutions Group.

SkyWater has a acquired 200mm semiconductor wafer manufacturing facility in Bloomington, Minnesota from Cypress Semiconductor Corporation in March 2017 and in a very short time managed to get a dozen customers on board.

It has 500 plus employees based in Bloomington, MN and manufacture on 200mm wafers and the 130nm/90nm manufacturing node. This doesn?t sound cutting edge as some other players are manufacturing today in 10nm, but you have to realize that the cutting-edge manufacturing is also the most expensive and hardest to customize. Most customers don?t need the cutting edge.

SkyWater has customers from government and defence agencies and has the DMEA certification Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) - which makes these manufacturing facilities unique.

Remember that GlobalFoundries had a Fab in Malta, New York state, and is US based and operated, but this company has foreign ownership, a clear differentiation to SkyWater US' homefield advantage. With current US administration and the persistence to dominate in the technology being US based and owned that will definitely be attractive for government funded business. The winners of the future need to make sense of billons of bits of data that the massive IoT is creating.