Last week, a South Korean court indicted a group of former Samsung engineers for revealing secrets about how to produce DRAM memory components to a Chinese technology company, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), which is expected to cause a decrease in the company's profits.
Recently, some interesting details about the case have been reported by South Korean media. The leak of confidential information to CXMT is said to be nothing new, as CXMT has reportedly started producing 10nm DRAM memory chips since 2024, two years earlier than expected. Samsung's investigation found that its own engineers had given them the company's secrets.
Initially, their investigation found that there was no leak or improper access to their server machines, but it was revealed that the engineers had been physically writing down the entire memory production process in a number of physical notes for the past five years.
These notes are believed to include more than 600 individual manufacturing steps, including detailed parameters such as gas flow ratios, reactor pressures and photoresist settings used in critical lithography and deposition stages.
The leak of this confidential information is expected to have caused losses of several trillion Won not only for Samsung, but for South Korea as well. South Korea and China are seen competing to see who can produce key components such as high-tech DRAM memory and so on.
This is seen as a very critical issue, especially now that all the big governments and semiconductor chip suppliers are competing to see who can make the biggest profit in the race to develop AI technology.
