Over the past few decades, the semiconductor foundry model transformed the traditional semiconductor industry by allowing companies to develop innovative chip designs without making the enormous investments required to develop and manufacture advanced semiconductor processes. Now, IBM and the U.S. government are betting that the same model can accelerate the emerging quantum computing industry.

Members of the Tirias Research team have consulted for IBM, GlobalFoundries, and companies throughout the quantum computing ecosystem.

IBM’s newly formed Anderon subsidiary has finalized an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce for a $1 billion award under the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the development of quantum wafer manufacturing in the United States. IBM is matching the government commitment with another $1 billion investment in Anderon, along with intellectual property, manufacturing assets, and personnel.

More important than the funding is the business model Anderon is trying to establish: a specialized 300mm foundry that can manufacture quantum wafers for IBM as well as outside customers. This could prove to be one of the most important infrastructure investments in the emerging quantum industry.

Leveraging IBM’s Semiconductor Expertise

Anderon is a new company, but the manufacturing expertise behind it is not. IBM was an integrated semiconductor manufacturer for decades, developing and producing many of the processors used in PCs, servers, mainframes, and other systems. IBM combined semiconductor manufacturing with one of the industry’s most influential semiconductor research organizations.

IBM’s semiconductor R&D legacy includes DRAM innovations, Dennard scaling, chemically amplified photoresists, silicon-on-insulator technology, high-k dielectrics, copper interconnects, advanced packaging, and leading-edge transistor architectures. IBM also played a major role in moving advanced logic into the EUV era. In 2015, IBM and its research partners announced the first 7nm test chip, followed by 5nm technology based on gate-all-around nanosheet transistor architectures. In 2021, IBM announced a 2nm-node test chip fabricated on a 300mm wafer at Albany, an industry first. In June of this year, IBM introduced nanostack, the world’s first sub 1 nanometer chip technology and new transistor architecture, packing nearly 100 billion transistors into a space about the size of a fingernail.

These developments are particularly relevant to Anderon because they demonstrate IBM’s strengths in process development, materials science, device architecture, lithography, interconnects, packaging, and manufacturing integration. While IBM has since exited semiconductor manufacturing, it retained its semiconductor research organization and continued investing in advanced process development.

The Importance of Albany NanoTech

Anderon’s manufacturing strategy will be closely tied to the Albany NanoTech Complex, one of the leading semiconductor R&D centers in the United States. Rather than constructing an entirely new facility, Anderon will leverage Albany’s existing 300mm facilities, equipment, and process infrastructure for its pure-play quantum foundry operations.

New York State established the Albany NanoTech Complex as part of an effort to build a semiconductor research ecosystem in the Capital Region. Beginning with an initial cleanroom and research facility in 1997, New York State, IBM, Tokyo Electron, SUNY, and other partners expanded the campus into a major 300mm semiconductor R&D and prototyping center. The complex now encompasses roughly 1.65 million square feet and represents more than $25 billion in public and private technology investment. The campus and its semiconductor R&D facilities are owned and operated by NY CREATES, a nonprofit organization that provides shared infrastructure for semiconductor research and development.

IBM has been an anchor research partner at Albany since the early 2000s. The collaborative campus has supported development of EUV lithography, advanced interconnects, nanosheet transistors, leading-edge process technologies, advanced packaging, and other technologies that could subsequently migrate into commercial manufacturing. That role continues with a $10 billion public-private initiative launched in 2023 and supported by IBM and outside investors, to establish next-generation High-NA EUV R&D capabilities at the site.

By utilizing Albany NanoTech, Anderon can leverage decades of investment in facilities, equipment, process technology, and an established semiconductor ecosystem rather than building a new fab from the ground up.

Transitioning from IBM to Anderon

IBM has emerged as one of the leading developers of quantum computing technology, particularly superconducting quantum processors, and is expanding into spin qubits through its acquisition of HRL Laboratories. As IBM’s quantum systems have grown more complex and the company seeks to expand production, the company will increasingly leverage Albany NanoTech for 300mm quantum-wafer processing, wafer-level test and characterization, vertical interconnects, bonding, and related manufacturing services.

Operating as a pure-play foundry, Anderon effectively turns those internal IBM capabilities into a commercial foundry service for the broader quantum ecosystem. The combination of IBM’s quantum computing and semiconductor process expertise combined with Albany’s established manufacturing infrastructure substantially reduces the technical and capital risk associated with establishing a quantum foundry from scratch. However, Anderon will still need to build trust as a foundry partner.

Quantum processors have very different manufacturing requirements from advanced CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. Classical processors emphasize extremely small transistor geometries and enormous transistor densities, while quantum processors place greater emphasis on materials, superconducting structures, device consistency, interconnects, and packaging. Anderon will initially support wafers for superconducting qubits and the I/O and readout circuitry used around quantum processors and additional quantum modalities in the future.

The quantum industry is entering a critical transition. For the past decade, much of the industry’s attention has understandably focused on qubit counts, coherence, gate fidelity, error correction, and competing quantum modalities. Those remain fundamental challenges. But as quantum systems become larger and more sophisticated, manufacturing is becoming another major constraint.

Quantum computing cannot become a large commercial industry if every quantum company effectively has to invent its own manufacturing infrastructure. Anderon represents an attempt to break that bottleneck.

Anderon combines IBM’s quantum and semiconductor process expertise with an established 300mm manufacturing environment. If it can establish repeatable manufacturing processes that serve multiple quantum companies, smaller developers could devote more capital and engineering resources to quantum architectures, systems, and software rather than wafer manufacturing.

Anderon is only the second commercial foundry for quantum processors, and the only one focused on semiconductor-based processors. GlobalFoundries, the only other commercial quantum foundry, is currently focused on photonic processors.

Significant uncertainties remain. Quantum computing is still an emerging technology, the winning architectures have not been determined, and commercial volumes remain small. However, just as the rise of independent semiconductor foundries helped create the fabless semiconductor industry, specialized quantum foundries could eventually help create a much broader fabless quantum industry.