Rapidus plans 17-member design group in first phase of CORE ecosystem

Rapidus has not shipped a commercial wafer yet, so the Japanese chipmaker is starting with the relationships that decide whether it ever will: a Collaborative Open Rapid Ecosystem whose first phase, a 17-company Design Solution Associates group, is meant to bridge the company and its customers across design and manufacturing. The named members include Cadence, Infosys, Synopsys, Toshiba Information Systems and Wipro, and Rapidus says later phases will extend the framework into electronic design automation and intellectual property; it does not name any customers or attach a figure to the program.

The venture was founded in November 2022 by the Japanese government and partners including SoftBank, Sony and NTT to boost domestic chip production, and it was said at the time that it would develop sub-2nm chips using technology licensed from IBM. It began testing its first production line in Hokkaido in 2025 and expects to begin manufacturing 2nm chips in 2027.

For a foundry that has not yet shipped a commercial wafer, the constraint that binds first is design wins: the tooling and service relationships a customer commits to well before it picks a manufacturer. That is the role the Design Solution Associates group is built to play, and it is a cheaper route to customers than another module of fab, though slower, since influence built through design work compounds over years and Rapidus has attached a 2027 date to volume production.

SoftBank's place on the founding roster sits alongside the $3.1bn take-private of DigitalBridge it closed on 1 October, a deal this publication covered. A foundry position in Hokkaido and an asset-management platform are separate arms, but both are wagers on owning the infrastructure compute runs on.

For anyone underwriting compute, Japanese advanced-node capacity is a supply-chain question before it is a real estate one, and Rapidus says it intends to meet demand in Japan and across the rest of the globe, though the announcement does not say which customers that means.

None of the roster yet amounts to an order book, which is what the later phases will have to demonstrate before the 2nm line starts in 2027.