IBM announces a partnership with Japanese chipmaker Rapidus to help it make the most advanced chips

CTOnews.com, December 13 (Xinhua)-- IBM said on Tuesday that it is working with Rapidus, a Japanese government-backed chipmaker, to help it make the most advanced chips. On December 6, Rapidus also announced that it had signed a memorandum of technical cooperation with the Belgian Microelectronics Research Center (IMEC) and planned to send staff to it.

As previously reported on IBM's official website CTOnews.com, Rapidus is a high-end chip company jointly invested by eight Japanese giants, including Toyota, Sony, Kaixia, NTT, Denso, NFC, Mitsubishi and Softbank Corp., and received a subsidy of 70 billion yen (about 3.577 billion yuan) from the Japanese government at that time.

Rapidus comes from Latin, meaning "fast". Rapidus mainly aims to mass-produce advanced semiconductors below 2 nanometers that have not yet been used in practice worldwide.

Rapidus plans to mass-produce 2nm chips in Japan in the second half of the 1920s, which will be used in areas such as 5G communications, quantum computing, data centers, self-driving cars and digital smart cities.