I’m joining SkyWater to lead its quantum offerings, and trading in my pursuit of one quantum technology roadmap for the responsibility of building the industrial base to power them all.
By Mihir Bhaskar, PhD, SVP & General Manager, SkyWater Quantum Solutions
Every commercial quantum effort I know of has some version of the same story. Terms that take months to negotiate, followed by a first wafer that takes quarters to ship, supplied by a foundry reluctant to take on the project in the first place.
I have had the unique privilege to build quantum hardware in almost every shape and size of organization: academia (Harvard), large company (AWS), startup (Lightsynq), and scale-up (IonQ). Most colleagues in the quantum field think of me for my diamond quantum interconnect work. However, my journey has brought me intimate contact with almost every corner of the commercial quantum ecosystem, and almost every major modality (superconducting, photonics, atoms, and ions among others).
Most quantum hardware platforms – including my own diamond interconnect – require new materials that don’t exist in conventional CMOS fabs, or require parameters they aren’t willing to qualify. Even CMOS compatible platforms, like IonQ’s trapped ion hardware faced 6+ month wafer turnaround times in 2025, with only a few designs running in parallel at any given time.
I’m a quantum person at heart, not a semiconductor veteran. But I’ve tried for over a decade to leverage semiconductor foundries for quantum. And what I’ve learned is this: in the semiconductor world, if you want to work with foundries, you have to play by their rules.
First, you literally have to follow their rules: from strict design parameters to material stack. Next, their commercial rules: no volume? No deal.
Quantum does not fit in the traditional foundry model.
Why SkyWater is the foundry quantum needs
I first started interacting with SkyWater last year as part of our search to run more designs in parallel at significantly higher velocity. I was heartened to find an engineering team in the fab with a culture geared precisely towards customization, flexibility, and speed, even at low volumes. My interactions with SkyWater were night and day from every other foundry I had interacted with.
SkyWater is not a conventional foundry, and that is exactly why it works. Its business has always been technology development: taking processes that do not exist yet and making them manufacturable. Customization is not an exception granted reluctantly to a big enough customer. It is the core product.
Non-standard materials are a routine engagement rather than a reason to decline the project. Hot lots are possible at low volume, so a development program does not sit behind production. Design variants can run in parallel instead of serially, which is what actually sets iteration speed. Advanced packaging and cryogenic characterization happen in-house across Minnesota and Florida rather than at three different vendors on three different schedules and three different sets of commercial terms. And the whole environment is built for programs that do not leak IP — locked down by default, with the security posture SkyWater’s defense and government customers already depend on.
The industry at large – including IonQ – is growing louder about the importance of building manufacturable quantum technologies. All the while, SkyWater’s MN fab has been quietly doing this for quantum customers for over a decade. The foundry quantum technologies needed was hiding in plain sight.
SkyWater Quantum Solutions is available now
In May, the Department of Commerce signed letters of intent worth roughly $2 billion under the CHIPS Act to accelerate American quantum computing, including two awards aimed specifically at building domestic quantum foundries. That is the right instinct and it is overdue. Our industry and our country need this capacity, and I am glad it is being funded.
But announced capacity is not available capacity. A foundry has to be built, tooled, qualified, and staffed with people who have done it before, and that takes years. Every quantum company reading this has a roadmap that needs wafers in 2027, not a facility that comes online at the end of the decade.
SkyWater Quantum Solutions already exists. The tools are installed and qualified. The processes are running. The engineers have been shipping quantum wafers consistently for over ten years. Capacity is available today, and a first wafer can be moving in weeks rather than quarters.
So why am I joining SkyWater to lead their Quantum Solutions offering?
First, the practical side. There are professional fabs, and there are teams with deep quantum expertise, and they are almost never inside the same organization. Bringing my team together with SkyWater’s fab means the person defining your process module intimately understands the device that module is for, and what actually makes it work. That is not a partnership between two companies with two sets of incentives and a contract in between. It is one team.
Second, the personal side. My history in and commitment to the quantum field runs far deeper than IonQ. The reason I am excited about IonQ and SkyWater coming together as one company is not simply to run IonQ silicon faster. It’s because after a decade of searching, I had found the foundry the entire quantum industry needed. Together with the SkyWater team, I can serve a greater calling than just a single technology roadmap, and accelerate the entire industry’s path to success.
What we are building at SkyWater
So what is my thesis for SkyWater Quantum Solutions? It starts with a thesis rooted in physics (I am a physicist by training, after all).
There are only two practical ways to route quantum signals: with optical photons, or with superconducting electronics.
Whatever your qubit is — trapped ion, superconducting, neutral atom, spin, photonic, or a defect in diamond — the signals going in and out, and connecting your qubits together at scale are either optical or electrical. The qubits themselves may be wildly different from each other. The routing and control layer underneath them is not. Which means two platforms – superconducting, and optical – done properly, serve the entire industry.
So that is what we are building.
SC250 is our superconducting platform integrated multilayer niobium routing and a Josephson junction layer for control logic on the chip. This is aimed squarely at the wiring and control bottleneck between today’s superconducting processors and fault-tolerant machines. You cannot run a million coaxial cables into a dilution refrigerator. The routing and the control have to move onto the chip. SC250 is built on over a decade of research, development, and production within SkyWater, and is available for customers today, with a long-term roadmap that includes full qualification assisted by leading partners such as Qolab.
SP90 is our photonics platform, leveraging low-loss Silicon Nitride designed for quantum. It covers the visible through near-IR, designed for performance you can trust at critical wavelengths that matter to quantum modalities, such as 493, 780 and 1064 nm. (And yes, custom wavelengths are supported). IP from Lightsynq and Nexus Photonics bring critical capabilities the quantum photonic supply chain needs. These include cryogenically compatible fiber-to-chip couplers below 0.5 dB loss and heterogeneous integration of the materials that do not exist in a CMOS fab: III-V and diamond for on-chip light generation, detection, and quantum memory. (We are considering adding more materials soon). The first SP90 wafers have already shipped and are available for customers today, with the fully qualified platform expected to launch in 2027.
There is one commitment that matters more than any capability on that list. We innovate on the enabling layer — materials, process modules, integration, packaging. The things a foundry and supporting manufacturing ecosystem is supposed to. You innovate on your architecture, your devices, your systems. We do not need to own your differentiation to build a good business here, and we are not going to try. Your innovation stays yours.
I spent a decade on the wrong side of this problem, waiting on wafers I could not get made. I would like to spend the next one making sure nobody else has to.
If the industrial base is what is slowing you down, my line is open: quantum@skywatertechnology.com
Forward Looking Statements
This post contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the expected launch of the fully qualified SP90 platform. These statements are only predictions based on my expectations and projections about future events as of the date of this post and are subject to a number of risks, any of which could cause actual results to differ materially, including, among others, those described under the heading “Risk Factors” in IonQ’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025 and in its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. New risks emerge from time to time. Except as otherwise required by law, no obligation is undertaken to update any forward-looking statement.