Engineers from Apple and Tesla to Assist Japanese Semiconductor Design

Semiconductor Legend Jim Keller Partners with Japan
Co-Designs AI Chip with LSTC, Produced at Rapidus
Concerns Raised Over Production Capacity Shortage

Engineers from Apple and Tesla are joining Japan's semiconductor industry revival project. Japan, which is currently investing tens of trillions of won in expanding foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) factories, is also accelerating efforts to secure fabless (semiconductor design) capabilities.

Bloomberg reported on the 27th (local time) that Japan's cutting-edge semiconductor technology center (LSTC) has partnered with the US startup Tenstorrent for advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip design. Tenstorrent is a Canada-based fabless company developing AI processors. Its CEO, Jim Keller, is known as a legend who designed Apple's iPhone 'A chip,' AMD's CPU 'Ryzen,' and was responsible for Tesla's autonomous driving engineering.

[Image source=AFP Yonhap News]

In addition to Keller, many veteran engineers with extensive experience in the semiconductor industry have joined Tenstorrent. Tenstorrent's chief chip designer, Wei-Han Lien, is known as an engineer who contributed to advancing Apple's in-house chip designs, enabling them to run on hardware such as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

According to reports, Tenstorrent has acquired design licenses for some of Japan's AI accelerators and plans to jointly design overall chips with LSTC. They also aim to catch up with leading semiconductor design companies like Nvidia and Arm by using the open-source RISC-V architecture. Furthermore, they plan to develop manufacturing know-how for 1.4nm (nanometer; 1 nm = one billionth of a meter) chips by 2028 and outsource production to Rapidus.

However, there are many question marks about whether Rapidus has the capability to produce the newly designed chips. According to reports, Rapidus aims to mass-produce 2nm process semiconductors by 2027, but Japan's current technological level is assessed to be around the 40nm scale. Takashi Yunogami, a former Hitachi engineer, criticized, "Rapidus's goal is like the wishful thinking of young hopefuls trying to become Shohei Ohtani overnight."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.