A former SK Hynix employee is suspected to deliver stolen technology to Huawei

Although not monopolized attention to the same extent that TSMC, Intel or Samsung, the South Korean company SK Hynix is ​​done is One of the main designers and manufacturers of semiconductors of the planet. His specialty is The tuning of memory chipsand it is doing so well that LEADS THE HBM Chips Market so much (High Bandwidth Memory) like that of the DRAM memories.

In fact, SK Hynix controls no less than 70% of the integrated HBM memory circuits market, so His leadership in this sector is overwhelming. In addition, it is the NVIDIA supplier if we stick to its GPU to artificial intelligence (AI) Thanks to the high competitiveness of your HBM chips. Samsung has an approximate share of 28%, and Micron touchs 18%. However, the success of SK Hynix is ​​based, as we can intuit, about its capacity for innovation.

At the current situation, industrial espionage is the order of the day

The Prosecutor of the Central District of Seoul (South Korea) has accused a former SK Hynix employee of illegally transferring technology to the Chinese company Huawei. This person’s identity has not yet transcended, but according to Digitimes Asia He is a name Kim, is South Korean and worked in the subsidiary in China of Sk Hynix until in 2022 he left this South Korean company to join Hysylicon, the Huawei subsidiary specialized in the design of semiconductors.

Presumably the Prosecutor’s Office is acting at the instances of SK Hynix. And it seems that this last company has discovered that during the negotiation of its hiring Kim gave Hysilicon Secret Information About advanced packaging technology used in the production of 3D NAND and HBM memories, as well as about multiple assembly Chiplets and of the CMOS image sensors.

These technologies are protected by the property rights of SK Hynix, and in them largely resides the competitiveness of this company. According to the Kim prosecution he printed and took more than 11,000 photographs of internal SK Hynix files with the purpose of abandoning this last company and using this confidential material to get work in the competition in very advantageous conditions.

In fact, according to the researchers of the Kim accusation he presented the material that extracted from SK Hynix at least two Chinese companies. One of them Hysilicon, He finally hired him. An important note: neither this last company nor its matrix, Huawei, asked him to give them commercial secrets, but, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, they accepted them as part of the hiring process.

More information | Digitimes Asia

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