Engineers Sentenced for Stealing Tech From US Chipmaker Micron Technology and Transferring It to China

TAIPEI, Taiwan—U.S. memory chipmaker Micron scored a major legal victory after a local court found two of its former employees guilty of passing trade secrets to a Chinese company.

Two engineers at Taiwanese contract chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) leaked technology from their former employer and used the trade secrets in a cooperation project with Chinese state-owned semiconductor manufacturer Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, the court ruled. Their supervisor was also convicted for his involvement in the scheme.

The district court in central Taiwan’s Taichung City on June 12 sentenced the three UMC staff to prison for 4 1/2 to 6 1/2 years. It also found UMC guilty of violating Taiwan’s law on trade secrets and fined it NT$100 million (about $3.37 million).

UMC, Fujian Jinhua, the two engineers, and another UMC employee were indicted on similar charges by U.S. federal prosecutors in November 2018.

Scheme

UMC and Fujian Jinhua signed a partnership in January 2016, with the latter providing $700 million in equipment and research funding to the Taiwan company for developing manufacturing process for making dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. Fujian Jinhua would then use that process to mass-produce the chips.

DRAMs are semiconductor memory chips that store data within digital products.

That same month, UMC created a “new business development center” in southern Taiwan’s Tainan city, for the sole purpose of creating the manufacturing process for Fujian Jinhua. The center was headed by Chen Zhengkun, former president of Micron’s Taiwan subsidiary, Micron Memory Taiwan (MMT). He resigned from MMT in July 2015, then joined UMC not long after.

According to the U.S. indictment, Chen recruited many MMT employees into working at UMC, including Ho Chien-ting and Wang Yung-ming, who joined UMC in November 2015 and March 2016, respectively.

Taiwan’s prosecutors found that before joining UMC, Ho downloaded Micron’s trade secrets

Asians invented gunpowder, rockets, the missile boat, certain kinds of steel, landmines, toothbrushes, toilet paper, the magnetic compass and more.

The Japanese would also like to have a word with you about all the things they invented in the modern era alone and have US patents to prove, and the Chinese have this nice list to prove you wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

Like much of the rest of humanity, one popular pastime was “making war on your neighbors.” Europe wasn’t much different.

There’s a bunch of technically non-military things on the Asian invention list, like paper and fireworks, but let’s face it, a lot of human technological development has been through or related to warfare no matter where you look - Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, all the same in that respect.

The US has had its share of IP pirates as well historically. Not defending the Chinese here, but if they have proportionally the same percentage per capita of piratical and corrupt folks as we’ve had, of course we’re going to see them as having a lot more people making off with IP. They have a lot larger population - and more importantly, their government doesn’t seem to want to care about IP because they’re corrupt and benefit from it. The Japanese government began caring about it in the 80s when Japanese electronics empires took the lead worldwide and the Taiwanese have spent most of the past thirty years stamping out the same problem. The Koreans don’t seem to have had the same cultural/governmental problem and they’re no less innovative.

The amusing thing is that a lot of the inventive Chinese realize that their own government won’t protect their inventions - so they move to Taiwan or here.

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