Taiwan Supreme Court has given its ruling that Samsung has learned trade secrets which has helped land the deal with apple to produce the upcoming A9 chip and also the QUALCOMM snapdragon 820 soc.
The main issue is that a former veteran employee of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for 17 years, a senior director of R&D at TSMC’s Advanced Modules Technology Division, was reportedly dissatisfied with the TSMC for passing him up for a promotion. He quit the post at the company with a reason of looking after his parents and teaching. He started teaching at Sungkyunkwan University, a research institute that is sponsored by Samsung.
He passed on the inside information about the manufacturing process of TSMC to Samsung. In turn Samsung used this information to build up its own manufacturing process and stole the biggest deals of the year in chip manufacturing from TSMC. Tsmc has sued the employee two times previously and won but it has now successfully barred the employee from working at Samsung for this year.
Liang Mong-song briefly worked as chief Technology Officer of Samsung’s System LSI group after completing this non-competition agreement which barred the employees from joining the rival companies and share the private information with his employer. Liand helped Samsung develop the 14-nanometer Finfet processes.
