Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, February 28 (Xinhua)-- Japanese chip contract manufacturer Rapidus said it will build a factory in Qianshi City, Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan. Rapidus said in a press release on Tuesday that the new plant aims to launch a prototype line for trial operation in 2025 and mass produce 2-nanometer chips later this decade.

Tuyuan Pexels the plant and the TSMC plant being built on the southern island of Kyushu are key pillars of Japan's semiconductor strategy to improve its ability to make more advanced chips and protect itself from supply chain troubles.

Rapidus, which has previously announced a partnership with IBM to develop and produce cutting-edge 2nm chips, plans to launch a prototype production line in 2025 and plans for mass production later this decade.

Rapidus was established in August last year and was jointly funded by eight Japanese companies, including Toyota, Sony, NTT, NEC, Softbank Corp., Denso, Leixia and Mitsubishi UFJ, with an investment of 7.3 billion yen, and the Japanese government also provided a subsidy of 70 billion yen as its R & D budget to improve Japan's competitiveness in the field of advanced semiconductors. When completed, the new factory will become the first 2nm fab in Japan.

"We are going to surprise the world by building an unprecedented semiconductor factory," said Atsuyoshi Koike, president of Rapidus.

Millennium City, Japan, with a population of about 100000, already has factories run by many large manufacturers, including silicon wafer maker SUMCO Corp and auto parts maker Denso.

A spokesman for Rapidus said that Rapidus expects investment in commercial production and 2nm technology development to reach about 5 trillion yen (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 255.5 billion yuan).

Tetsuro Toto, chairman of Rapidus, told Reuters this month that the company would need about 7 trillion yen, mainly taxpayer money, to start mass production of advanced logic chips around 2027.

Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan's industry minister, called Rapidus a "project symbolizing US-Japan cooperation" and said the Japanese government planned to expand support for the company as it went into actual production.

The Japanese government provides subsidies of up to 476 billion yen (currently about 24.324 billion yuan) to TSMC's plant in Kyushu, in which Sony Group and Denso each have minority stakes.

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