Last week, South Korean prosecutors indicted multiple individuals in a case alleging that a former Samsung engineer leaked advanced DRAM manufacturing process data to China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), shedding light on how leaked trade secrets may have accelerated China’s push into 10nm-class memory. Now, it has come to light (via SemiAnalysis) that the engineers in question allegedly took note of detailed critical manufacturing steps in handwritten notes taken over five years.
The former Samsung engineer was arrested for offences under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act and the Industrial Technology Protection Act for allegedly passing along information on Samsung’s sub-10nm DRAM process before CXMT began mass production of comparable memory in 2024, two years earlier than expected. This may have caused trillions of losses in Korean Won for both Samsung and South Korea. Meanwhile, CXMT is expected to capture as much as 15% of the market thanks to its advanced memory products.
