SkyWater Technology

SkyWater Technology, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the only US-owned and operated pure-play silicon semiconductor foundry accredited by the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) as a Category 1A Trusted Foundry — the highest trust classification for fabricating microelectronics for classified U.S. government and defense applications.

This DMEA accreditation is central to SkyWater's strategic value: it means U.S. military, intelligence, and space agencies can source chips with confidence that the fabrication facility, supply chain, and workforce are domestically controlled, eliminating foreign supply chain risks that have increasingly concerned the Department of Defense as chip manufacturing has concentrated in Taiwan and East Asia.

SkyWater traces its history to the former Cypress Semiconductor fab in Bloomington, which SkyWater Technology Foundry (the operating entity) acquired and converted into an open-access foundry model focused on specialty process technologies rather than competing in commercial high-volume nodes (7nm, 5nm). SkyWater's commercial process nodes are deliberately older by commodity semiconductor standards — the company's flagship process is a 90-nanometer node — but 90nm remains highly appropriate for space and defense applications where radiation hardness, temperature tolerance, and long-term process stability matter far more than the transistor density maximized by leading-edge foundries.

SkyWater specializes in radiation-hardened (rad-hard) CMOS processes that produce chips capable of operating in the ionizing radiation environment of space and high-altitude aerospace platforms. Space radiation causes single-event upsets (SEUs), latch-up, and gradual total ionizing dose (TID) degradation in standard commercial chips; rad-hard processes use specialized circuit topologies, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates, and redundancy techniques to tolerate these effects. The Department of Defense has invested up to $170 million in SkyWater's rad-hard capabilities, including expansions funded through CHIPS Act and DoD microelectronics security programs.

SkyWater went public in 2021 (NASDAQ: SKYT) and serves defense primes, government R&D programs, and commercial aerospace customers who cannot source chips from foreign foundries for national security or supply chain assurance reasons. The company competes with BAE Systems' rad-hard foundry services and Microchip Technology (formerly Microsemi) in the domestic trusted foundry market.