Chips & Supply · United States

The U.S. Just Bet $1 Billion on Quantum Chip Manufacturing

Credited to IEEE Spectrum · spectrum.ieee.org · 10h ago

Photograph · IEEE Spectrum

The U.S. Department of Commerce has finalized a CHIPS and Science Act R&D award of up to $1 billion for Anderon, a quantum foundry IBM established earlier this year. The 16 September announcement backs a manufacturing service for IBM and other quantum-hardware developers.

IBM is matching the award with $1 billion in cash and contributing intellectual property, assets, and skilled workers. Headquartered in Albany, N.Y., Anderon builds on an existing operation at Albany NanoTech, where IBM has made quantum wafers for more than five years, says CEO Mukesh Khare. That existing infrastructure has helped Anderon get started: Its first wafers are already moving through a production-scale, 300-millimeter line.

Quantum computing “is moving from science to real commercial impact now,” Khare says. “That means the industry also needs a more stable manufacturing source for building quantum chips.”

If Anderon is successful, it could do for quantum hardware what TSMC did for conventional chips: let companies focus on designing chips without each one having to build a multibillion-dollar factory for the underlying hardware.

What an Automated Quantum Fab Can Offer

IBM says shifting much of its quantum wafer R&D from the 200-millimeter fabrication lab at the IBM Research headquarters in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., to the Albany 300-millimeter line, beginning in 2021, doubled chip-development speed and increased its chips’ physical complexity tenfold. Round-the-clock processing shortened fabrication cycles, and advanced manufacturing techniques enabled more elaborate wiring and qubit connections. Anderon draws on Albany NanoTech’s manufacturing capability and IBM’s experience deploying more than 90 quantum systems since 2016. The challenge now is extending those capabilities to outside designers. Anderon’s potential customers include processor developers without fabs, system builders, and national laboratories. Even companies with their own manual chipmaking facilities may be interested in outsourcing fabrication to an automated foundry. Rigetti Computing, for example, another CHIPS Act R&D award winner, is in talks with Anderon, according to CEO Subodh Kulkarni.

Rigetti currently makes processors on 150-millimeter wafers in its manual fab in Fremont, Calif. Kulkarni puts its yield near 50 percent, which he says is “good enough” for R&D when specs are changing frequently. But Anderon promises more reliable automated chip production that companies like Rigetti could retain to advance their own chip development. “We find that to be very attractive,” Kulkarni said, “not because of capacity, but because of capability.”

Like conventional silicon foundries, Anderon plans to offer process design kits, or PDKs, specifying the rules designers must follow to use its manufacturing processes. “They design, we build,” Khare says. Customization will also be available, he said, and the foundry will protect clients’ intellectual property and operate neutrally, including for IBM’s competitors.

Making that model work will require predictable fabrication. For superconducting qubits, a critical component is the Josephson junction, which consists of two superconductors separated by a thin insulating barrier. Variations in junction area and barrier thickness can change critical current and qubit frequency, potentially creating unwanted frequency overlaps and reducing chip yield.

Anderon’s automated line could help control variation through repeatable patterning, deposition, and oxidation, with in-line testing to identify process drift. But customers will need to measure the actual improvement in qubit performance, Kulkarni says.

Anderon’s latest-generation 300mm quantum wafers. Anderon

Much of the fabrication equipment overlaps with that used for silicon chips, although superconducting circuits require specialized materials and process steps. Anderon advertises superconducting qubit arrays, microwave components, and through-silicon connections. But extending manufacturing capabilities to other quantum technologies, like trapped ion or photonic qubits, would require additional process development that Anderon has not publicly detailed yet.

Semiconductor spin qubits can already be fabricated on conventional chip production lines, says Lieven Vandersypen of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, while superconducting qubits require specialized steps that may require new development.

A dedicated quantum facility could spread costs and support the development of processes optimized for quantum devices, according to Vandersypen. “Understanding how to make this transition is timely and important,” he says.

Manufacturing capabilities alone will not make Anderon quantum computing’s TSMC. It also needs sustained demand beyond IBM. Designers have alternatives. Vandersypen points to QuantWare’s investment in its own wafer-scale facility and Belgium’s imec, which supplies prototype quantum chips rather than pursuing high-volume manufacturing. “Time will tell which model will prevail. Perhaps both will co-exist,” he says.

Commerce is backing several approaches to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in the global quantum market. While Anderon’s award is the largest so far, Commerce has finalized up to $375 million for GlobalFoundries and up to $100 million each for Rigetti, D-Wave, Quantinuum, and PsiQuantum. Those awards support manufacturing for multiple quantum architectures and address bottlenecks including readout electronics, cryostats, superconducting materials, optical components, and photonic packaging. Shared wafer fabrication is one piece of the larger engineering effort.

Khare says he can deliver wafers to outside customers by the end of the year. For potential customers such as Rigetti the test will be how reliably those chips meet increasingly demanding designs. As Kulkarni puts it: “If we tighten the specification, what would the yield be?”

Chips & SupplyUnited States

Micron union secures strike approval

Credited to Taipei Times · taipeitimes.comJust now

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INDUSTRY STANDARD: Most global semiconductor companies have tied employee bonuses directly to corporate profits, the union said, urging Micron to do the same

Micron Memory Taiwan Co’s (台灣美光) Taoyuan union secured strike authorization yesterday after a six-day vote, ramping up pressure on management to build a reasonable profit-sharing mechanism.

Before the strike, the Taoyuan union “encourages” members to join a protest in Taipei on Oct. 19, union chairman Jerry Lin (林哲瑞) told a news conference in Taipei.

The union did not rule out staging a snap strike, Lin said.

The union has 2,258 registered members, with 88.3 percent backing the strike, he said.

The vote comes as Micron’s board of directors is meeting today and tomorrow in the US. The union expects the board to respond favorably to its request to overhaul the company’s bonus policy, Lin said.

The union asked the Boise, Idaho-based company to set up a transparent, fair bonus distribution mechanism and allocate 15 percent of its operating profits to employee bonuses, Lin said.

Micron previously distributed 10 percent of its net profit as employee bonuses, demonstrating that such a profit-sharing scheme is a viable solution, the union said.

Most global semiconductor companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and Micron’s South Korean competitors, Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc, have adopted similar approaches tying employee bonuses directly to corporate profits, the union added.

Taiwanese memory producers Nanya Technology Co (南亞科技) and Macronix International Co (旺宏) have allocated 6 percent of pre-tax profit and 15 percent of net profit to reward employees respectively, the union said.

Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電) and Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電) have also adopted a similar mechanism, it said.

Micron employees’ annual payouts are mainly subject to the terms of the incentives pay plan (IPP) with several limitations. At issue is the five-month boundary, which means a typical top-performing engineer’s actual IPP payout maxes at about five months of base salary.

Micron Taichung Union, which represents about 10,000 Micron employees in Taichung and Tainan, yesterday said it is to launch a second-round negotiation with management on Oct. 22.

The union would not rule out holding a strike vote if the company fails to address its request, Micron Taichung Union chairman Mark Hsu (徐志銘) said.

The unions said that manufacturing capacity from Micron’s Taoyuan and Taichung facilities represents more than 60 percent of the US memory chipmaker’s total global output.

Micron Memory Taiwan yesterday said in a statement that it “respects our team members’ lawful rights and the applicable legal process.”

“We hear the concerns our team members have raised and take them seriously,” the statement said.

To prevent widespread strikes in Taiwan, Micron on Sept. 11 temporarily stepped outside the standard IPP framework by offering extraordinary, one-off cash appreciation bonuses of NT$1 million (US$31,451) for Taiwan employees and 100 percent equity penetration to boost total employee rewards up to 35 to 68 months’ worth of pay for this fiscal year.

Bankers in Hong Kong skipped the summer break as an artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled rush for capital sent share sales to a record, defying a bruising selloff in the city’s stocks. Initial public offerings (IPOs), placements and block trades raised US$47.5 billion in July to last month, the biggest haul ever for the period, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. That pushed fundraising this year above US$92 billion and within reach of the US$112.5 billion record set in 2021. AI has been at the heart of Hong Kong’s deal revival, but this summer brought a new level of intensity. Chinese companies raised ever-larger sums

SILICON ISLAND: When asked about geopolitical tensions, Lisa Su said that ‘Taiwan is absolutely critical to the semiconductor supply chain, and very, very critical for AMD’ Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) yesterday said the company plans to “substantially” increase manufacturing capacity next year through its Taiwanese supply chain, particularly with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-related processors continues to outstrip supply. “It is a very exciting time right now for all kinds of compute, and especially on the CPU [central processing unit] side,” Su said during a visit to Taiwan. “The overall market has increased a lot in 2026, and so we have also increased our own supply and capacity in 2026, but I can

BOOMING BUSINESS: Memory supply constraints would be even more severe in 2027 and 2028, prompting customers to sign long-term supply agreements, Micron said Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光) yesterday said it is accelerating memorychip capacity expansion amid growing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven demand, with its accumulated investment in Taiwan reaching NT$1.6 trillion (US$50.2 billion) as of June. The company’s investment in Taiwan has surged over the past four years, with recent spending equaling the total invested over the past 25 years, Micron Taiwan chairman Donghui Lu (盧東暉) told a media briefing in Taipei. “The launch of ChatGPT and the outbreak of COVID triggered increasing demand for memory chips. Since then, demand has gathered pace rapidly, with only a brief pause in 2023 when a major downturn”

Sea levels in California are set to rise by as much as a foot (30cm) in the coming days as an enormous wave washes up the US West Coast. The huge surge of energy, known as a “coastal trapped wave” or a “Kelvin wave,” is part of El Nino, a months-long phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that scientists say could generate powerful storms and floods in some parts of the world, while leaving others in drought. The Kelvin wave is not anything like a tsunami; nor does it crash on beaches. Rather it is a sustained bulge of excess water up to

Original · Taipei Times

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