International Business Machines Corp (IBM) is prioritizing helping Japan’s chipmaking start-up Rapidus Corp, with a senior executive describing the budding foundry business as vital to securing long-term global supply.
Rapidus, a venture backed by some of Japan’s biggest electronics firms, is turning IBM’s 2-nanometer chip design into production-ready silicon and aims to fabricate such chips at scale in the latter half of this decade. The most advanced semiconductors today are built at the larger 3-nanometer node.
“When it comes to 2-nanometer technology, we are focusing our efforts on Rapidus and investing a great deal of resources to this project, even sacrificing some capacity that we could have used in other research,” IBM Japan chief technology officer Norishige Morimoto told Bloomberg News in an interview. “We want Rapidus to succeed. We want it to contribute to a stable supply of the chips we and the world need.”
Photo: Reuters
Rapidus is a quasi-public project that started last year as a venture to build out Japan’s local chipmaking capacity amid rising geopolitical tensions and protectionism.
It has the government’s support and is led by veterans of the semiconductor supply chain, including Tetsuro Higashi, the former chairman of Tokyo Electron Ltd, and Atsuyoshi Koike, the former Japan president of Western Digital Corp.
The daunting task ahead of them is to create a world-class chipmaking foundry — fabricating silicon for outside customers — to catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) within a handful of years.
Rapidus has drawn investment from companies including Toyota Motor Corp, Sony Group Corp and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. Rapidus is working with IBM and Belgium-based microelectronics research hub Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre.
The company’s engineers have been dispatched to IBM’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, New York, to design 2-nanometer mass production lines while its factory is being built in Hokkaido, accelerating the development process.
The Japanese firm expects to invest ￥5 trillion (US$34.52 billion) in its 2-nanometer project, roughly matching the annual outlay of TSMC and fellow leading chipmaker Samsung Electronics Co.
IBM would be open to helping Rapidus lock up further deals with major chip firms.
“We won’t rule out any options as long as they match with our business needs,” Morimoto said.
IBM also provides chipmaking technology to Samsung’s foundry division.
“Rapidus and Samsung are on the same platform as they both use IBM technology, and it’s very possible the two can strike a win-win partnership as their business models are quite different,” Omdia analyst Akira Minamikawa said.
Semiconductor demand is set to keep growing as a post-COVID-19 recovery takes hold and an artificial intelligence boom drives the need for more memory and computing power.
Global revenue is expected to reach US$1 trillion by 2030, doubling in a decade, said Inna Skvortsova, a market analyst at industry body SEMI.
Currently, only Samsung and TSMC can produce the most advanced chips and there is widespread interest — from Washington to Beijing and Brussels — in adding more redundancy to the sources of supply.
Rapidus would ideally offer a third option, and, moreover, should be welcomed by the industry leaders who have struggled to meet demand, Morimoto said.
“We know from our own experience that providing the newest generation of chips is not something that one company can handle alone,” he said. “Both TSMC and Samsung will welcome Rapidus joining the club of cutting-edge chip manufacturers because, as things stand now, they are making customers wait. Rapidus taking some orders from them wouldn’t be a problem.”
TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) has said he does not see Rapidus as a competitor, as the Japanese chipmaker would focus on fostering engineering talent.
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