Challenging Samsung and TSMC
Following Intel in the United States, Japanese companies have declared their participation in the semiconductor ultra-fine process competition, turning the two-way race between Samsung Electronics and Taiwan into a four-party competition.
Atsuyoshi Koike, president of Japanese semiconductor company Rapidus, said in a recent interview with the Nihon Keizai (Nikkei) Newspaper that the company needs to begin running a line of prototype 2-nm chips in the first half of 2025 to mass-produce them from the second half of the 2020s.
Rapidus is a joint venture established in 2022 by eight Japanese conglomerates, including Sony, Toyota, Kioxia, and Softbank, to localize the design and manufacturing of advanced semiconductors.
In June 2022, Samsung Electronics succeeded in mass production of 3-nm chips for the first time in the world. At the end of the same year, TSMC, the No. 1 player in the global foundry industry, also started mass production of 3-nm chips. These companies are now pushing for the development of more advanced chip production processes.
Samsung Electronics laid out a roadmap to introduce a 2-nm process in 2025 and a 1.4-nm process in 2027. TSMC has a similar plan to Samsung's.
Intel has put forward a more aggressive development roadmap than those of Samsung Electronics and TSMC. Intel said that it will produce 3-nm semiconductors in the second half of this year, 2-nm chips in 2024, and 1.8-nm chips in 2025.
Then, Rapidus came up with a detailed roadmap. The Japanese government plans to invest 5 trillion yen (about 48 trillion won) in the semiconductor sector over 10 years, and has already decided to provide 70 billion yen (about 683 billion won) in subsidies.