A South Korean court sentenced a former Samsung Electronics engineer to seven years in prison for illegally obtaining DRAM production secrets and transferring them to China’s Changxin Memory. The case uncovered a massive industrial espionage program.
The engineer had worked at Samsung for 28 years and moved to Changxin Storage Technology (CXMT) around 2016. The investigation found that he illegally received a detailed process recipe plan – a document containing about 600 18nm DRAM production stages. It contains information on technical operating sequences and equipment parameters, which can significantly speed up the development of their own production processes.
At a recent court hearing, a former employee said Changxin Storage management initially wanted to obtain Samsung technology to produce its own DRAM. According to him, the company did not have the necessary research capabilities when it was founded in 2016, and they allegedly did not even intend to develop the technology from scratch.
The story continues in other criminal cases. In April 2026, another former Samsung executive was sentenced to six years and four months in prison and a fine of 200 million won for transferring semiconductor production technology to China. The court particularly emphasized that such crimes cannot be considered trivial due to the huge costs and time required to create advanced technologies.