Thursday, May 4th 2017
TSMC Trade Secrets Stolen - Former Engineer Arrested In China
In the highly competitive, high-stakes scene of the business world - and particularly so in the silicon giants of the era - trade secrets, specifications, and protecting one's intellectual property that give the leg-up on competitors is key towards success. And while most companies work within the meanders of law (even if sometimes skirting it ever so lightly), some don't. And things like this happen: the steal (or purported steal, because no one has been convicted yet) of trade secrets by former employees is one of the most dreaded occurrences in the tech world - remember Zenimax and Carmack's "dovetailing"?
Chinese manufacturers are looking to enter the high-performance computing market with their own products, designs, and manufacturing capability. In this case, former TSMC engineer Hsu is being accused of stealing proprietary information and other materials related to the foundry's 28 nm process technology. The goal would be to pass them to China-based Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC), with which he accepted a job offer, according to the Hsinchu District Prosecutors Office. Digitimes reports that HLMC had been aggressively headhunting for talent to kick start its 28 nm manufacturing process, though if true, this sound like a little too aggressive of a headhunting.
Sources:
Digitimes, WCCFTech
Chinese manufacturers are looking to enter the high-performance computing market with their own products, designs, and manufacturing capability. In this case, former TSMC engineer Hsu is being accused of stealing proprietary information and other materials related to the foundry's 28 nm process technology. The goal would be to pass them to China-based Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC), with which he accepted a job offer, according to the Hsinchu District Prosecutors Office. Digitimes reports that HLMC had been aggressively headhunting for talent to kick start its 28 nm manufacturing process, though if true, this sound like a little too aggressive of a headhunting.
36 Comments on TSMC Trade Secrets Stolen - Former Engineer Arrested In China
And I'm aware of west doing similar, but there is one big difference usually. Even if western company steals some competitor info, they don't blatantly copy it into their product. They'll say, ok, we got this info, what can we do with it to make our products better. And then their engineers try to figure out what competition has done better. That's how progress and innovations happen. China simply doesn't give a damn and just blatantly copies it. Not all, but majority does. Again, like I've said, they are forced to abandon their ways once they go global, because patents and lawsuits would kill them.
While is no related to the topic at hand, what is related are those big countries trying to do profit in any way, despite of any common sense or fair practices.
Set aside that the process you describe for western companies trying to figure out how to innovate on stolen material is an embellishment of "trying not to get cought" and that's not wat innovation relies upon, the assertion that chinese industrial revolution is largely based on exploiting and copying western products is bogus.
China is going all the way out to innovate and create a cradle for the next generation drive of national growth(they are launching a frigging space station!). You can find a lot of data on chinese scientific production in the last 20 years online and all this data says one thing: in the last 10 years the scientific and engeenering output of the country has grown 100 folds.
But then, let's put into the discussion the fact that the knowledge of cheap counterfeiting has come to china solely through western companies outsurcing production to exploit slaverish labour costs (destroying our economy in the process).
And oh noes for not putting steal in quotes like "steal". How many times do I have to say stealing ones blueprints is very different to taking a retail competitor product, disassembling it and learning from that? Jesus...
What patents do is protect an exact design from being made by anyone else then the person or company owning the patent rights for a period of time. Getting the same outcome using different mechanisms didnt work for the Asetek "thiefs".