CXMT planned to use stolen Samsung IP to develop its DRAM, court hears — former Samsung engineer who jumped to Chinese memory maker now behind bars

Former Samsung engineer Jeon, who defected to Chinese dynamic random access memory (DRAM) firm ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) around 2016, confessed in court that his new company intended to obtain Samsung's intellectual property (IP) related to memory process technologies. CXMT's executives were not aiming to develop an entirely independent process technology from scratch, but rather to strategically acquire Samsung's IP to advance its own production nodes, according to the testimony.

Jeon was sentenced to seven years in prison in April for illegally obtaining 600-step Process Recipe Plan (PRP) data from Samsung concerning DRAM fabrication processes and the 18nm-class node. CXMT lacked its own research institutes or facilities at the time of its inception and had no intention of developing technology through its own research.

A comprehensive process recipe can drastically reduce the time required to develop a production node by revealing crucial details like sequence of steps, deposition or etch conditions, anneals, cleans, implant parameters, temperatures, pressures, tool types, and so on. While a process recipe can potentially aid in ramping any fabrication technology, it does not necessarily disclose the complete transistor architecture or physical design.

Therefore, obtaining additional information such as cross-sectional structures, masks/layout information, design rules, device dimensions, and capacitor geometry is necessary. By combining process recipe with reverse engineering of shipping products, experienced DRAM engineers can reconstruct much of the technology used in the fabrication process.