2nm’s “League of Losers”

Latest update time：2023-12-31

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There is a new company in Japan called Rapidus, which claims to mass-produce 2nm chips in Japan by 2027.

It sounded like a joke at first, but then everyone discovered that this little-known Japanese company might be serious.

Rapidus was launched in 2022 and received a big red envelope of 70 billion yen from the Japanese government at the beginning. Later, it also received a total of 7.3 billion yen in funding from 8 Japanese companies including Toyota and Sony. Not only that, Rapidus also cooperated with IBM and IMEC, the Belgian Microelectronics Research Center, have reached a cooperative relationship. They need money and technology. It coincides with the rise of geopolitical conflicts. The Japanese media broke through the threshold of this company and talked about Japan's last hope for semiconductors.

To the surprise of many people, the Japanese government is also rarely serious. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has provided a subsidy of 260 billion yen just to help it build a 2nm chip factory in Chitose City, Hokkaido.

What exactly is Rapidus? What confidence does it have to challenge TSMC and Samsung?

Lian Po is old

To talk about Rapidus, we cannot avoid two key figures, one is President Tetsuro Azuma and the other is President Junyoshi Koike.

Tetsuro Higashi is not a professional semiconductor engineer. He graduated from International Christian University (ICU) and received a master's degree from Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School. He majored in modern Japanese economic history. In 1977, he joined the company with only 200 employees at the time. The famous Tokyo Electronics has a relationship with semiconductors.

In an interview with Japanese media, Higashi Tetsuro said that he was neither a mechanical boy who liked playing with machines, nor an engineer. Before he was 10 years old, there was no telephone or TV at home, and the only electrical appliance in the home was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The electric light on the wall and a vacuum tube radio placed on the drawer cabinet. When listening to music, he usually uses a gramophone with a rotating handle. He only needs to turn the handle. He is obsessed with philosophy and economic history, but he has become one of the representative figures of Japanese semiconductors. one.

In 1996, 46-year-old Tetsuro Higashi became the president of Tokyo Electronics. He was at the forefront of the industry in terms of the separation of directors and executive directors and the introduction of stock options. Under his leadership, Tokyo Electronics also became one of the top companies in Japan. First, the third largest semiconductor equipment company in the world.

By 2013, Tetsuro Azuma, then chairman and president, began to promote the merger of Tokyo Electron and Applied Materials of the United States to establish a new company jointly controlled by both parties. After the merger, the sales of semiconductor equipment of the new company will increase significantly. Surpassing other companies and firmly ranking first in the world, in the interview, Tetsuro Azuma said that the merger with Applied Materials can achieve complementary products, strengthen technical strength, and reduce costs.

However, the acquisition has been delayed for two years and has not been negotiated. Regulators in both China and the United States have expressed opposition. After this setback, Tokyo Electronics and Applied Materials both experienced declines of varying magnitudes. Then in 2019, Tokyo Electronics declined even more. There were two consecutive years of losses. According to unwritten rules, Tetsuro Higashikata was forced to resign as chairman and president.

For Tetsuro Higashikata, who had experienced the glorious moments of Japanese semiconductors, what he was thinking about was how to make a comeback. Just then, the chief technology officer of IBM called and said: "IBM has completed the development of 2-nanometer technology. Do you want to use the same technology to develop 2-nanometer technology?" Let’s cooperate and choose mass production in Japan?”

Higashi Tetsuro said that if Japan does not do it, other countries will do it. This is Japan’s last chance. So he found Junyoshi Koike, then president of Western Digital Japan, and Akira Amari, chairman of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Congressional Caucus for Promoting Semiconductor Strategy, to discuss the feasibility of cooperating with IBM to produce 2nm chips. The three hit it off, and Rapidus was born.

Unlike Higashi Tetsuro, Koike Junyi himself was an engineer. He loved dismantling and assembling things since he was a child. He became obsessed with radios in junior high school and took relevant qualification examinations for this purpose. Later, he was admitted to the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Waseda University and studied in in electrical engineering from the Graduate School of Tohoku University, Japan.

In 1978, Junyi Koike joined Hitachi Manufacturing Co., Ltd. and entered the Semiconductor Division, officially starting his semiconductor career. Over more than 20 years, he started as an ordinary semiconductor engineer and eventually became a semiconductor engineer at Hitachi. The person in charge of the semiconductor production technology department can be said to be one of the most senior semiconductor engineers in Japan.

In 2000, Hitachi Manufacturing and Taiwanese foundry giant UMC jointly established Tresenti, which means "300" in Latin, which means a wafer with a diameter of 300mm. At that time, 300mm wafers were popular and the wafer foundry concept was booming. , Japanese companies did not want to miss this opportunity. As a senior executive of Hitachi Semiconductor, Koike Junyi naturally became the chairman and president of this new company.

At that time, the Japanese semiconductor industry proposed a very bold plan. What plan was it? It means that Japan's 11 major semiconductor manufacturers will cooperate with each other to jointly develop the next generation of semiconductor processes, and each technology will be brought together into a "main factory", which will be responsible for the OEM production of Japanese semiconductors, while Hitachi's development of OEM For business, Tresescenti is the perfect choice.

However, these 11 companies were not as united as everyone imagined. They all chose to develop their own 90nm technology, and the plan eventually aborted. As Hitachi split its semiconductor business, Tresescenti was eventually merged into Renesas Electronics, and Japan developed crystal chips. Hopes of round foundry were finally dashed.

After that, Junyi Koike successively served as the president and representative director of SanDisk Corporation, the representative director of Japan HGST Co., Ltd., and the president of Western Digital's Japanese subsidiary. Until he received the invitation of Higashi Tetsuro, he experienced the glory and decline firsthand, and wanted to revive Japan. With a background in semiconductors, he became the president of Rapidus without any hesitation.

It is worth mentioning that both the corporate names of Tresescenti (meaning 300) and Rapidus (meaning fast) were created by Junyoshi Koike. Although they are more than 20 years apart, they both stand on the same page. At the forefront of the Japanese government's semiconductor strategy, it shoulders the mission of revitalizing the industry, and was born to achieve mass production of advanced processes. Japanese Semiconductor seems to have never given up its dream of making a comeback.

However, there is an old saying that Lian Po is too old to still be able to make a living. Higashi Tetsuro was born in 1949 and Koike Junyi was born in 1952. One is 74 years old and the other is 71 years old. They are considered senior players in the world, let alone Rapidus is still a newly established company, not other mature companies. Japan has placed its hopes in semiconductors on these two old people. On the one hand, it can be seen that the aging level of Japanese society is high. On the other hand, it also reflects the current situation of Japanese semiconductors. Lack of talent.

Talent withered

Some people may say that the president and chairman do not represent Rapidus as a company. As long as there are funds and technology, there will definitely be more fresh blood injected into it.

Is this really true?

As of December this year, Rapidus's total number of employees has increased to 280, mainly composed of veteran employees who have left other companies. In the next fiscal year, Rapidus will hire fresh graduates for the first time, but even among the current 280 employees, Talents with wafer foundry skills are rare.

In August this year, Rapidus held an induction ceremony for more than 30 semiconductor engineers, many of whom are over 50 years old. Although they are veteran employees who have worked in large semiconductor and electronics companies for many years, they are determined at this age. Become a front-line employee rather than a manager, but this may not be something that can be achieved with hard work.

In an interview with Reuters, Suzuki Yumi, 55, who joined Rapidus this year, has worked in the semiconductor industry for more than three decades since graduating from college in 1991. At first, she was engaged in front-end manufacturing equipment development, and later Switching to back-end processes such as packaging and testing, I worked for a Japanese image sensor company for more than 20 years. Although Rapidus’s plan includes more than advanced processes, the span from image sensor packaging to the development of 2nm process is somewhat larger. .

Yonemaru Naoto, who joined the company at the same time as Suzuki Yumi, is now 31 years old. He jumped into the industry after Japan's semiconductor industry entered a period of stagnation. He is one of the few young people in Rapidus, but his previous company was a semiconductor materials manufacturer, and Compared with the lithography technology to be developed in the future, it can be said to be completely different.

There are many Rapidus employees similar to these two. They come from the equipment field, materials field, or design field. There are many big bosses who are senior executives in the original company, but in wafer manufacturing There are very few in the front-end field. After all, since the bankruptcy of Elpida, Japan has been blank in advanced manufacturing processes for more than ten years. Now it is not easy to find suitable talents.

What to do if there are no talents? We can only train them from scratch.

In order to achieve its ambition of mass production of 2nm in 2027, Rapidus began to send engineers to IBM's US R&D base, Albany Nanotechnology Park. In April this year, it dispatched the first batch of 7 engineers. As of now, there are about 100 Rapidus engineers. Living in this park, it is divided into 6 groups, which carry out R&D work with IBM in the fields of "design", "patterning (circuit formation process)" and "devices (completing the evaluation of semiconductors)". The ultimate goal is to put Semiconductor mass production technology is brought back to Japan.

A group of senior employees in their 40s and 50s have to learn from IBM, which has withdrawn from the wafer foundry field, in three or four years, and complete work that took others more than 20 years to complete. This is not so much an inspirational story promoted by the media. , it is better to say that it is another satellite of the semiconductor industry, no different from a fantasy.

Moreover, even if these engineers return to China after completing their studies and become the key force driving Rapidus to produce 2nm chips, a qualified wafer foundry still needs several times as many grassroots engineers as managers. This problem may be more difficult than solving mass production. It’s a bit more difficult because Japan simply doesn’t have that many engineers with OEM experience.

In fact, the competition for semiconductor engineers in Japan is intensifying today. According to Recruit statistics, the number of semiconductor talents in Japan has been decreasing since 2010, but the number of recruitments has been increasing rapidly. In the past ten years, the number of job vacancies for semiconductor-related engineers in Japan has increased by as much as 12.8 times.

Hiroyuki Araki, strategic executive officer of semiconductor equipment manufacturer SCREEN, revealed: "Starting around 2013, recruitment has become increasingly difficult. Even for 3D semiconductor packaging technology, which is regarded as the next generation technology, "there are no human resources" ( Orii Yasumitsu, senior executive officer and general manager of Rapidus Packaging Division), in academia, "Companies need semiconductor talents most, but universities also have needs in this area" (Tetsuro Endo, director of the International Integrated Electronics R&D Center at Tohoku University).

What Japanese semiconductors have lost is not only the market and revenue, but also the supporting human resources. We have previously discussed the difficulties faced by Hong Kong in developing semiconductors, and also discussed the lack of new talents at TSMC. At this point, Rapidus It is more difficult than the first two. In the context of declining birth rates and an aging population, there is a big question mark as to whether the original plan to have 1,000 employees when mass-producing 2nm in 2027 can be achieved.

Of course, many experts have long expressed doubts about Rapidus. Mr. Takashi Yunoue, the director of the Japan Precision Machining Research Institute, once wrote an article saying that if a baseball boy in elementary school wants to become a player in the future, he wants to play like Shohei Ohtani (a player of the Los Angeles Angels of the Major League Baseball). Superb baseball. It is naturally impossible to join the major leagues after three years. He can only play in Koshien first, then join the Nippon Professional Baseball team, and finally work hard to transfer to the major leagues.

The gap between Rapidus and 2nm is just like the baseball boy and Shohei Ohtani. It is impossible for Yunoue Takashi to complete mass production in three years.

The consulting director of British research company Omdia pointed out that due to the lack of experience in mass production of cutting-edge semiconductors, Japan's barriers to mass production are "quite high". TSMC has a wealth of experience and technology, while Rapidus seems to rely only on IBM and a group of non-profit companies. Veteran employees of the wafer manufacturing industry.

When the Japanese media vigorously advocated 2nm, there were also sober people thinking about how to open up sales channels after mass production was completed. In the 1980s and 1990s, the electronic products produced by Japanese companies were enough to consume most of the production capacity. Now that the 2nm process is so expensive, how many companies are willing to use it?

Even Hisashi Kanehashi, director of the Equipment and Semiconductor Strategy Office of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said that although he has been encouraging Rapidus investors, the biggest challenge is how to connect with those who use the most advanced semiconductors, "Starting from the automotive industry, we "Use cases for advanced semiconductors will be created." Considering the development of new energy vehicles in Japan, his words are a bit too optimistic.

The optimism of a “loser”

Tetsuro Azuma, Junyoshi Koike, and Rapidus employees who have experienced the decline of Japanese semiconductors. They are not reconciled to Japan's marginal position in the development of world semiconductors. They gather under one sign and want to regain their past glory.

Their optimism and fighting spirit come from their past experiences, from being part of the "losers" of Japanese semiconductors, and from their common direction and goals. Sony, Renesas and Kioxia are all Japanese semiconductor giants. , which is also dominated by senior employees, but does not have such vigor. The emergence of Rapidus has added a breath of fresh air to the sluggish Japanese semiconductor, and also made many people no longer immersed in the pessimism of the past.

Rapidus does not exist as an independent company like the previous Tresescenti and Elpida. It is a National Semiconductor Company funded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. As long as the Japanese government does not stop funding support, Rapidus can grow at an alarming rate. Continuing to develop, from this perspective, Rapidus is more like the five Japanese DRAM giants in the 1970s, allowing the country to ensure the competitiveness of its own semiconductors.

Is 2nm technology important? Of course it is. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are all crazy about the progress of the 1nm process. The annual investment in wafer factories alone is tens of billions of dollars.

But to a certain extent, 2nm is just a banner waved by Rapidus. As semiconductor veterans in their seventies, Higashi Tetsuro and Koike Junyi cannot understand the difficulty of achieving this goal, but as long as the 2nm card is played, We can get more subsidy funds, attract more people with lofty ideals, and give Japanese semiconductors more hope.

Rapidus, an alliance composed of "losers", may not be able to create a real 2nm chip, but as the saying goes, a thousand dollars buys a horse's bones, and Japan's purpose of establishing Rapidus may have been achieved.

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