Contract chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) yesterday said it would appeal a local district court’s ruling that found it and three employees guilty of stealing and misappropriating trade secrets from Micron Technology Inc’s local units.
The Taichung District Court yesterday imposed a NT$100 million (US$3.36 million) penalty against the world’s No. 3 chipmaker, after ending two-and-a-half years of investigations.
UMC employees Ho Chien-ting (何建廷), Wang Yong-ming (王永銘) and Rong Le-tien (戎樂天) were found guilty of breaching the Trade Secrets Act (營業秘密法) by leaking sensitive information to Hsinchu-based UMC after leaving Micron, the ruling said.
Ho was sentenced to five years and six months in jail, while Wang and Rong received jail sentences of four years and six months and six years and six months respectively.
The court also fined them a total of NT$15 million, which is less severe than the maximum fine of NT$20 billion.
“UMC did not breach the trade secrets law. The company will appeal the guilty ruling and the heavy penalty,” UMC said in a statement following the ruling.
The DRAM process technology at the core of the lawsuit was developed by UMC’s 300 engineers over more than two years, building on UMC’s own technological capabilities, the chipmaker said in the statement.
UMC was developing DRAM chip manufacturing technologies in collaboration with China’s Fujian Jin Hua Integrated Circuit Co (晉華集成電路) through a Chinese subsidiary.
The project was terminated in 2017 after UMC and the three employees were indicted for allegedly illegally replicating the US memory chipmaker’s manufacturing techniques for UMC‘s businesses in China.
UMC said that there were flaws in the investigation, such as coerced false confessions.
Micron said that “it is grateful to the court and to Taiwan law enforcement authorities for their fair and balanced handling of the criminal trade secret misappropriation case.”
“We are pleased that the court found UMC and the three employees named in the lawsuit guilty and that justice has been served,” it said.
The misappropriation of trade secrets and their transfer outside of Taiwan is detrimental to the nation’s entire semiconductor industry and threatens future competitiveness, Micron said.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS