Allegedly, former employees of SEMES, a subsidiary of Samsung that develops chip cleaning equipment, sold the production secrets of the machines to China for a huge sum of about 96 million dollars
Prosecutors in South Korea filed charges this week against five people for leaking the world’s first supercritical semiconductor cleaning core technology developed by SEMES, a major subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, to China.
The Swan District Attorney’s Office announced on January 16 that it had filed charges against five people, including former SEMES researchers and a technology leak broker, for violating the Industrial Technology Protection Act and the Unfair Competition (Leakage of Trade Secrets) Act. Of the five, four were arrested and one was released under restrictive conditions.
Founded in 1993 by Samsung, SEMES is a major subsidiary that manufactures semiconductor and display manufacturing equipment.
The company is developing equipment for cleaning the chips in the manufacturing process, which can reduce the defect rate of ultra-micro semiconductors by minimizing damage to the substrates. After cleaning semiconductor wafers with chemical and other solution, the equipment dries the wafers using supercritical carbon dioxide. The Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy has designated the equipment as a key national technology.
The five defendants included a former SEMES employee who retired from the company in 2016 and founded his own company in 2019. He is suspected of transferring key blueprints of supercritical semiconductor cleaning equipment, which he purchased through the CEO of partner company SEMES, to a technology leak broker in June 2021. The broker leaked the blueprints to China.
Investigators found that the former SEMES employee and others earned a whopping 119.3 billion won (about $96 million) by exporting 20 units of cleaning equipment from December 2019 to July 2022.
A former SEMES employee is also accused of leaking information about the single phosphate cleaning equipment, developed by SEMES in 2021 for the second time in the world, to his company’s employees by contacting a former SEMES researcher, who was also arrested and prosecuted. Silicon wafer phosphate cleaning equipment cleans semiconductors one by one using a phosphoric acid solution. It is used to remove silica left on wafer surfaces. Only two companies managed to develop this equipment in the world – SEMES from Korea and Shibora from Japan.
In May last year, a former SEMES employee was arrested and charged once for leaking information about SEMES’ wet semiconductor cleaning equipment to China. He was released on bail in November last year due to the end of his detention period and was tried without custody, but was jailed again after the prosecution revealed the affair of the additional technology leak.
“Between 2009 and 2021, SEMES invested approximately 35 billion won in research and development of the supercritical technology,” said an official in the lawsuit. “This crime caused a direct loss of more than 35 billion won. The fear is that SEMES will suffer a loss of more than 40 billion won a year if the orders to SEMES drop by only 10% due to a decrease in the company’s technological strength.”