🇯🇵 Rapidus

Starting with the latest entrant in the foundry race: Rapidus is a nascent Japanese foundry born from a desire to reclaim parity in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. They are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government with additional funding from 8 large domestic companies including Toyota, Sony, and others. Their stated ambition is to open a 2nm pilot line in April 2025 with high volume manufacturing in 2027 and further node development to at least a 1.4nm node. This is a brand-new company trying to go from incorporation in 2022 to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) at the bleeding edge of logic in 5 years. We believe it’s going to be very tough journey ahead of them.

Via a joint development partnership, Rapidus will license IBM’s 2nm process technology and put it into production. The process has not been used in high volume (IBM’s server chips were made on old GlobalFoundries nodes and now Samsung 5nm). The process emphasizes small batch sizes to enable fast iterations and fast learning. This might make sense for a nascent company trying to ramp leading edge logic but they are trading learning speed for high volume efficiency. There’s a reason why their competitors use large batches.