[News Today] CHIP TECH ALMOST LEAKED TO CHINA

[LEAD]
A former Samsung Electronics employee has been caught trying to hand over key semiconductor technology to a Chinese firm. Chinese firms are also setting up local branches in Korea to steal these technologies.

[REPORT]
Making semiconductors is a repetitive process of carving circuits on wafers.

During this process, impurities as miniscule as one ten-thousandth thickness of a hair must be removed.

The cleaning technology used in this stage is key to the semiconductor manufacturing process.

Prof. Park Jae-gun / Hanyang Univ.
One of the 7 semiconductor manufacturing processes is cleaning. Korea developed that technology which is the best in the world.

Eleven people from a Korean company were caught trying to leak this cleaning technology to an overseas firm.

A former cleaning process engineer from Samsung Electronics, known as A, founded a business in Korea and signed a deal in 2021 to hand over the personnel and technology to a Korean corporation of China's largest equipment maker in return for 7.8 billion won, over 5 million US dollars.

He even built semiconductor cleaning equipment for export by stealing its design with the help of former employees from Samsung Electronics and other contracting companies.

A large shipment of this equipment could have been exported to China, but the prosecution raided the company and stopped the crime.

The ex-Samsung Electronics employee and his accomplices all denied any wrongdoing, claiming that they had 'developed it on their own,' but investigators found during the forensic process that they had stolen the technology from Samsung Electronics.

Overseas leakage of industrial technology has noticeably been on an increase lately.

Seo Min-woo / Prosecutor, Suwon Dist. Prosecutors' Office
We found out that an overseas company established a business in Korea to steal technology. They can easily recruit engineers reluctant to live abroad.

One company from which the technology was stolen had spent more than 200 billion won, over 137 million U.S. dollars, for technology research and development.