IBM

It has been a couple of decades since a Japanese fab has offered a leading-edge chip manufacturing process. Even to this day, none of the Japanese chipmakers have made it as far as adopting FinFETs, something that U.S. and Taiwanese companies adopted in early-to-mid-2010s. But Rapidus, a semiconductor consortium backed by the Japanese government and large conglomerates, plans to leapfrog several generations of nodes and start 2nm production in 2027. Interestingly, the company aims to serve world's leading tech giants, challenging TSMC, IFS, and Samsung Foundry. The endeavor is both extremely challenging and tremendously expensive. Modern fabrication technologies are expensive to develop in general. To cut down its R&D costs, Rapidus teamed up with IBM, which has done extensive research in such fields as transistor...