A former tsmc employee is accused of stealing confidential information

A former employee of TSMC, the leading silicon chip manufacturing foundry in Taiwan, has been accused of stealing trade secrets from his former employer to offer to his new company, HLMC.

TSMC is a victim of theft of confidential information

The employee in question has been mentioned as "Chou" by DigiTimes, this employee has been accused of stealing IP and trade secrets of vital silicon chip manufacturing technologies in the 10 nanometer and 16 nanometer processes. Chou reportedly carried this confidential information with him until his next job at Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC).

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Before Chou could leave TSMC bound for HLMC, he was arrested by the Taiwan police and charged with breach of trust. The matter is now in the hands of the corresponding District Attorney, and has become a sub judice. As for TSMC, it is not commenting on it, so we will have to wait to see how the events unfold. The development of 10 nanometer and more advanced silicon fabrication nodes is proving to be extremely costly and time consuming for foundry companies.

For this reason, only the most advanced foundries are being able to move their nodes forward at 7 nm and 10 nm, even the almighty Intel is having many problems and is already several years behind with the arrival of its first processors at 10 nm, the Cannon Lakes that should have hit the market in 2015.

Recently GlobalFoundries has announced that it is indefinitely canceling its manufacturing process at 7nm, so AMD has had to move all production of its future chips to TSMC, the only company that is already capable of manufacturing at 7nm.

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