If the company meets the announced deadlines, equipment with a new generation of chips from Rapidus will appear on the market in the late 2020s. In this way, the Japanese consortium will catch up with Taiwanese TSMC, which plans to produce full-scale 2nm chips in 2025.

production organization

First, Rapidus has to decide on a site where line development and production will be organized. This issue is expected to be resolved by March 2023. Location is important as it must have access to a stable water supply and electrical infrastructure. Proximity to cities where you can attract workers is also an important factor.

In Rapidus, it is assumed that the company will need to invest about $ 15 billion to start production and one and a half times more to start mass production of processors. Customers were promised to help with the development of chips and optimization of the production process to reduce the delivery time of finished products.

While this is expected to be an advantage over TSMC and Samsung Electronics, both of which produce various types of products in large volumes, Rapidus aims to produce only high quality, high margin variants.

What do we need 2nm chips for?

Such processors will be more powerful, smaller and more efficient in terms of energy consumption. They will find application in artificial intelligence developments and supercomputers of the future. Arranging production according to the new technical process is not a trivial task because it involves the use of a new architecture different from the one used, for example 12 or 28 nm products that TSMC plans to start producing in a new factory. Factory in Japan as early as 2024.