Chinese memory firm CXMT relied on leaked Samsung technology to skip years of R&D, court testimony claims

Cutting corners: Building a memory chip from the absolute ground up takes years and costs a fortune. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) apparently decided to skip the hard part – and today, the company stands as China’s biggest DRAM producer. A South Korean court recently heard some fairly wild details about how the memory maker actually got its start.

That origin story came directly from a former Samsung Electronics engineer surnamed Jeon, according to Maeil Business. The veteran employee spent almost three decades at Samsung before jumping to the rival firm around 2016. Jeon appeared in a Seoul courtroom this past week to testify under oath about those early days, telling the judge that his new employer lacked basic laboratory facilities and never planned to do its own independent research when it was founded.

Instead, startup executives reportedly wanted to grab a highly confidential blueprint from Samsung right from day one. Engineers in the semiconductor industry call that document a Process Recipe Plan: it lists roughly 600 specific manufacturing steps, telling engineers exactly what temperatures and equipment pressures to use on the factory floor so they don’t have to guess.

Samsung spent five years and well over a billion dollars dialing in the specifications for its 18-nanometer memory chips. Prosecutors now say the Chinese firm simply recruited a bunch of former Samsung workers to swipe all of it.

By 2023, the company had begun mass-producing advanced memory chips. Today, its output has grown from 40,000 to 720,000 wafers in just a few years, and it’s closing in on Micron.

Unsurprisingly, South Korean authorities haven’t let this slide. Prosecutors indicted ten people late last year for illegally leaking protected national technologies, and a judge handed Jeon a seven-year prison sentence this past April for his role.

Proving all this in court could give Samsung a powerful weapon moving forward. Legal experts believe the company might take sworn statements straight to the US International Trade Commission, a body with the authority to block foreign products from entering the country entirely.