The prosecution has charged a former employee of SK hynix with leaking the company's next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technology to corporations in China.
On the 7th, the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office's Cybercrime Investigation Division (Director General Ahn Dong-gun) reported that A (51), who worked at SK hynix's local subsidiary in China, has been arrested and indicted for violating the Act on the Prevention and Protection of Industrial Technology Leakage.
A is accused of leaking confidential company data in order to transfer to the semiconductor corporation HiSilicon while working as a resident officer at SK hynix's subsidiary in China in 2022.
According to the prosecution, A reportedly took and stored over 11,000 photos of SK hynix's technology documents related to the CMOS Image Sensor (CIS). CIS is a semiconductor device that converts light into digital signals.
Among the materials photographed by A, it is said that contents related to the advanced technology of Hybrid bonding, which pertains to HBM technology, were also included. Hybrid bonding technology involves pre-forming metal electrodes on the surfaces of two wafers and then joining them together to electrically connect the wafers. This technology is advantageous for significantly improving thermal dissipation by reducing stacking thickness, and it is essential for creating HBM, which requires stacking multiple DRAM chips vertically.
A reportedly deleted the 'confidential' phrase and company logo from some technical documents before taking pictures of them. It has also been revealed that A used trade secret materials to write a resume and submitted it to the Chinese company.