
Did chip espionage, IP theft give Samsung its 14nm manufacturing lead? - luu
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/198925-did-chip-espionage-ip-theft-give-samsung-its-14nm-manufacturing-lead
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ChuckMcM
Money quote: _" According to Liang himself, he left TSMC after he was passed
over for promotion and felt his work was under-appreciated by his former
employer."_

Which apparently he was, as TSMC argues they are now "losing" millions in
revenue because this guy helped Samsung get their 14nm node up. And yet at the
time they were unwilling to give him a promotion and/or pay raise. What this
argues is that TSMC could have doubled the guys salary and come out ahead by
millions. Think about that employers when you start "nickel and diming"[1] the
engineers that work for you :-)

[1] American slang for charging (or being charged) in many small and ways
which add up to a much larger total later on.

~~~
SolarNet
That's a fair assessment, on the other hand, down this road is corporate
dystopias and more powerful multinationals.

When corporations have no recourse about their knowledge workers leaving and
working for a competitor and giving up their IP/Trade Secrets, well companies
are going to start to take more drastic measures. It's like the cold war, with
scientists defecting back and forth, at some point these companies are going
to start have spy/counterintel services if they can't rely on governments to
deal with it.

~~~
bsder
> When corporations have no recourse about their knowledge workers leaving and
> working for a competitor and giving up their IP/Trade Secrets

Companies do have recourse. It's called treating your employees well enough
that they don't leave.

If your company isn't smart enough to know who is important and how to keep
them happy, then your company is going to have problems. Technical staff,
especially, tend not to jump for small amounts of money or minor problems.

As for technical workers, you simply can't prevent knowledge from leaving when
they walk out the door. Especially for things like semiconductor manufacturing
research, the knowledge of what was tried and _didn 't_ work is often more
valuable than the knowledge as to what did work. How in the world would you
stop that?

Finally, he left in 2011. You're going to have a pretty difficult time
convincing me that Samsung's current 14nm node is solely base upon TSMC
manufacturing that was only at 28nm at the time.

Overall, it sounds like TSMC had an internal political battle over what
direction the semiconductor process research should go. Liang lost the battle
and left. It seems that Liang was correct from an engineering standpoint, and
the folks who stayed behind at TSMC were wrong. Sucks to be TSMC.

~~~
gress
You say 'treating their employees well enough that they don't leave' but that
ignores the fact that a small number of employees will be able to blackmail
the company for millions with the IP they have access to, while regular
employees pay the price.

~~~
6d0debc071
Because big-wigs would totally pay their regular employees more if their
expenses were lower rather than celebrating slightly more profit for
themselves?

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bsder
This is nothing new. If you piss off the people important to your company,
you're gonna have a bad time. cf. The original Traitorous Eight from Shockley
Semiconductor in 1957

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_Eight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_Eight)

~~~
raintrees
Or it can be done legally above board to get around trade secrets for
competition, as in the Phoenix BIOS.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies)

~~~
hga
Not trade secrets, by definition, because all was exposed. In fact, if I
remember correctly, IBM even published on paper the assembly for their (first)
BIOS.

This is a copyright vs. patent sort of thing. What Phoenix copied using the
"Chinese Wall" technique is the sort of thing that _might_ be covered by
patents, that is, ideas. The IBM BIOS was a creative implementation/expression
of those ideas, and that code was copyright protected, as was Phoenix's
independent version of the code that implemented the same ideas.

~~~
raintrees
You are correct about the paper copy, I still have the IBM Technical Reference
Manual binder that has the full code listings.

------
bhc
The fact that the article used by ExtremeTech as the source
([http://english.cw.com.tw/article.do?action=show&id=14895](http://english.cw.com.tw/article.do?action=show&id=14895))
refers to Liang, the former TSMC employee, as a "traitor" over and again casts
doubts in my mind about the accusations presented.

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ripberge
Doesn't surprise me. My old boss (a professor at Cal Tech) has a story of
coming into his labs one afternoon when an assistant greeted him with "Oh, the
Koreans came by to take the photos of the hardware." To which he replied,
"What Koreans?"

~~~
hkmurakami
Out of curiosity, what era was this in? Recent or decades ago?

(genuinely curious if this style of blatant espionage still goes on today -- I
have some stories from the 80's)

~~~
ripberge
He told me this story around 2005. I would guess it may have been about 5-10
years prior to that. Could have been more as he was there for a long time.

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ghshephard
Interesting that there is an entire article on potential (emphasis on
potential) theft of intellectual property, but not a single mention of
patents.

Don't the various semiconductor companies have massive stocks of patents, for
just this sort of situation?

~~~
rhino369
In something like semiconductors, the main competitors have tens of thousands
of patents and each infringe each other 500 times over. It is essentially a
wash.

Competitors suits are only a good idea when you have a clear patent advantage.
That is why Apple and Google got blitzed during the smartphone wars. They
didn't have a phone patent portfolio like everyone else, since they were new
players. It's the reason Google bought Motorola.

Also, semiconductor processing is hard to reverse engineer so there are legit
trade secrets that are kept.

~~~
josteink
> That is why Apple and Google got blitzed during the smartphone wars.

To be fair, Apple pretty much started that one on their own. It was just
business as usual and didn't turn into war before Apple decided they owned
usability and the _critical_ rounded corner IP.

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yellowapple
I'm just going to assume that Betteridge's Law of Headlines is in effect here.

If you're going to make some strong claim like "Samsung stole IP", phrase it
as a damn declarative statement. Phrasing it as a question instead only
suggests to me that the claim resulted from rectal extraction and is entirely
unfounded.

