Speed and customization are the key features of the production system being pursued by Rapidus. The company aims to establish a system that enables flexible responses to the needs of rapidly evolving, innovative fields such as AI. The semiconductor manufacturing process consists of (1) the design of the circuit, (2) the front-end process, in which the circuit is formed on the silicon wafer, and (3) the back-end process, in which the wafer is diced into individual chips and turned into products. As these processes are usually undertaken by different companies, even 3-nm chips require nearly two years from development to production. Rapidus aims to conduct both the front-end and back-end processes in-house, and also to support product design that optimizes production by utilizing big data obtained in the front-end process, thereby accelerating the speed of production exponentially—“like the difference between a regular slow train and a bullet train.”