Rapidus is a joint venture established in 2022 by eight Japanese companies including Sony, Toyota, NTT, Mitsubishi, NEC, Kioxia and SoftBank, aiming to achieve the design and manufacturing of localized advanced semiconductor processes. Rapidus has built an innovative integrated manufacturing factory (IIM-1) in Chitose, Hokkaido, Japan, as a production base for 2nm chips, with the goal of achieving mass production in 2027. However, as advanced packaging technology becomes more and more important in modern chips, Rapidus has also begun to get involved in this field.
According to relevant media reports, Rapidus has developed a panel-level packaging (PLP) prototype using a glass interlayer and plans to achieve mass production by 2028. Rapidus showed off the prototype design at SEMICON Japan 2025 in Tokyo this week.
The core of Rapidus development is a 600 x 600 mm glass substrate. By using a large square glass substrate to replace the traditional round silicon wafer, it can not only reduce the waste of materials, but also meet the multi-module combination with larger chip area and higher integration required for the next generation AI accelerator.
Glass interposers are cheaper than traditional organic materials and overcome the drawbacks of traditional approaches, offering significant advantages including excellent flatness, improved lithography focus, and superior dimensional stability in next-generation system-in-packages where multiple chiplets are interconnected. In addition, glass substrates have better thermal and mechanical stability, making them more suitable for high-temperature and durable application environments required by data centers.
Whether it is semiconductor manufacturing technology or advanced packaging technology, Rapidus appears to be very ambitious and wants to be at the forefront of the industry.