Last week, South Korean prosecutors indicted multiple individuals in a case alleging that a former Samsung engineer leaked advanced DRAM manufacturing process data to China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), shedding light on how leaked trade secrets may have accelerated China’s push into 10nm-class memory. Now, it has come to light (via SemiAnalysis) that the engineers in question allegedly took note of detailed critical manufacturing steps in handwritten notes taken over five years.
The former Samsung engineer was arrested for offences under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act and the Industrial Technology Protection Act for allegedly passing along information on Samsung’s sub-10nm DRAM process before CXMT began mass production of comparable memory in 2024, two years earlier than expected. This may have caused trillions of losses in Korean Won for both Samsung and South Korea. Meanwhile, CXMT is expected to capture as much as 15% of the market thanks to its advanced memory products.
It's estimated that Samsung invested roughly 1.6 trillion KRW over five years to develop its 10nm DRAM technology. The core allegation is that CXMT was able to bypass much of that learning curve and, by extension, cost by calibrating its own production equipment using the stolen process “recipes,” adjusting them as needed to account for differences in toolsets and materials. This would not have eliminated the need for validation work, but it could have dramatically reduced the time and cost required to reach acceptable yields at advanced nodes.
As a result of this, CXMT has emerged as China’s most advanced DRAM producer over the past several years, beginning volume shipments of 17nm DRAM in 2022 and moving into 10nm-class production in 2023, a transition that surprised many, given the technical difficulty of scaling DRAM without access to leading-edge lithography tools. Prosecutors argue that Samsung’s trade secrets played a direct role in this rapid progression, including in CXMT’s subsequent work on HBM stacks.
While companies have invested heavily in digital access controls, monitoring, and data loss prevention systems, handwritten notes remain difficult to track or audit. Investigators say the accused engineer exploited this gap by memorizing and transcribing process flows, which is virtually impossible to police effectively.
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