An unnamed Taiwanese company has been caught stealing designs for 64Mb devices from Korean companies, as I understand it the Taiwanese company is Vanguard and legal action may not be far away.
As Vanguard is one of the most active of the Taiwanese in the DRAM market any legal restraint on selling 64M devices could help to improve market conditions.
Euro David
Samsung, LG Semicon Drawing Up Plans to Prevent Ind. Espionage
Samsung Electronics and LG Semicon, two of the nation's leading semiconductor makers, are busy drawing up plans to prevent industrial espionage in the aftermath of revelations that former and even working researchers provided valuable chips design information to a Taiwanese company.
Industrial espionage has not been a major issue in Korea, especially for Korean companies due to their comparative lack of high technologies. The stealing of industrial secrets, therefore, has come as a major shock.
According to the prosecution, 16 former and present researchers of Samsung and two from LG have been involved in passing out technological information of the 64M DRAM (megabit dynamic random access memory) since 1989.
An executive of Samsung left the company in 1989 and set up a venture capital firm with the intent of recruiting semiconductor researchers to pass out vital information to the Taiwanese company.
The prosecution, which arrested all 16 researchers involved, said the venture company allegedly received $100,000 per month from the Taiwanese company for delivering the technological information.
As a result, the Taiwanese company, the exact identity of which is being withheld, has been making headway in the production of memory devices after specializing only in non-memory chips.
Samsung officials said they are looking at a number of options, including naturally taking the Taiwanese company to court, but the prosecution is still underway and action can only begin thereafter.
As for LG, company officials said they are admittedly ill-prepared against such espionage but concrete measures will be developed soon to prevent such occurrences in the future.
koreatimes.co.kr |
