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Semiconductor History | IIM-1, 千歳 — The Fab Japan Is Betting On, Without a Customer Yet
· 2023-9
Personal memoryBy kevin · · Report an issue
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Semiconductor History | IIM-1, 千歳 — The Fab Japan Is Betting On, Without a Customer Yet
kevin
9/1/2023
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More than a dozen crawler cranes stand over a steel frame, red and white against a grey Hokkaido sky, with snow on the ground and an airport runway in the foreground.
The photograph was taken from New Chitose Airport in March 2024. What is being built across the runway is IIM-1, at 758-62 Bibi in Chitose, and the ground was broken on 1 September 2023.
It belongs to Rapidus, a company formed in 2022 with money from Toyota, Sony, NTT, NEC, SoftBank, MUFG, Kioxia and Denso, and a great deal more from the Japanese state.
The plan is to manufacture logic chips at two nanometres, a node Japan has never made.
That is the part worth being precise about. Japan did not fall one generation behind in leading-edge logic; it left the race decades ago and kept its strength in materials, tools and memory instead.
Rapidus is not attempting to climb back through the intervening nodes. It is attempting to skip them.
The method is borrowed capability. Process technology comes from IBM under a transfer agreement, with Japanese engineers sent to work in Albany; the company also holds research membership at imec in Leuven, which appears elsewhere in this collection as the lab that exists so competitors can share what none of them can afford alone.
The dated milestones are real and they arrived roughly on time.
In December 2024 Japan's first mass-production-grade extreme ultraviolet scanner, an ASML NXE:3800E, was installed here, and the pilot line started in April 2025.
On 18 July 2025 two-nanometre gate-all-around transistors ran for the first time on this site, and later measurements found them meeting their expected electrical characteristics.
In February 2026 a funding round of ¥267.6 billion closed, which made the Japanese government the company's largest shareholder.
And then the thing that is not solved.
By the middle of 2026 the chief executive was describing talks with more than sixty companies about two-nanometre capacity, and not one of them had signed a volume agreement. A foundry with a fab, a process and no committed customer is a different proposition from one with orders.
Mass production is targeted for 2027, with 1.4 nanometre development beginning in 2026, a fab for it from 2027, and production around 2029.
Everything above is current only to the middle of 2026 and this is a subject that moves; check before relying on any of it.
What a visitor can do is what the photographer did. Stand at New Chitose Airport, look across the runway, and see whether the cranes are still there.
Photo: どういたしまして, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the Rapidus plant under construction at Chitose, seen from New Chitose Airport, 14 March 2024).
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