A South Korean executive accused of stealing semiconductor information developed by Samsung Electronics has been detained again on fresh allegations related to the theft of chip processing technology, a court official and his lawyer said yesterday.
The Seoul Central District Court issued a warrant to detain Choi Jinseog on Thursday due to concerns that he was a flight risk, a court official said, who declined to provide further details.
Choi, a former Samsung executive who ran a chipmaking venture in China, has already been the subject of a high-profile industrial espionage trial since July 2023 and was arrested and released on bail last November.
Photo: AFP
Choi has rejected the charges.
He now faces new allegations of being involved in stealing information related to 20-nanometer DRAM chip processing from Samsung, Choi’s lawyer Kim Pilsung said.
Kim said his client denied any wrongdoing and the information he is accused of stealing is publicly available.
Choi has not been indicted over the new allegations, his lawyer said.
Samsung has declined to comment.
In a case that underscores South Korea’s efforts to crack down on industrial espionage and slow China’s progress in chip manufacturing, Choi was indicted in June 2023, accused of seeking to build a copycat chip factory in China with sensitive information developed by Samsung.
The award-winning engineer was once seen as a star in South Korea’s chip industry.
After being freed on bail, Choi said in April that police were investigating him and one of his former employees, an ex-Samsung worker, over fresh allegations related to Samsung’s chip processing technology.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
RSS