Rapidus President Atsuyoshi Koike said on the 13th that mass production of advanced logic semiconductors is expected to begin between late 2027 and early 2028, narrowing a timeline the state-backed chipmaker had already pushed back once.
Rapidus has told the public it would reach mass production in the second half of fiscal 2027. Koike's remarks tighten that target to a specific window.
The company was set up in 2022 under government leadership and built a new plant in Chitose, Hokkaido. It has been running repeated trial production using 2-nanometer-generation technology licensed from IBM.
Koike spoke at an event in Tokyo on the 13th. "We are right in the middle of trial production now," he said. "By repeating this, we will start 2-nanometer mass production from the end of next year into the beginning of the year after."
A deadline that has moved before
The shift matters because the plant's output is meant to put Japan back in the race for cutting-edge logic chips, a field now led by TSMC of Taiwan and Samsung of South Korea. Rapidus is betting on a technology generation that neither has yet brought to volume production at home.
The 2-nanometer label refers to the size of circuit features, where a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Smaller features generally mean more transistors per chip and lower power use.