By Wen-Yee Lee<\/p>\n
NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 27 (Reuters) – A Taiwan court fined the local unit of Japan’s Tokyo Electron T$150 million ($5 million) on Monday, and handed jail terms of up to 10 years to five individuals convicted \u200cin a case relating to TSMC’s sensitive chip technology.<\/p>\n
The ruling comes in one of Taiwan’s highest profile cases involving national \u200csecurity charges related to unlawfully obtaining trade secrets from TSMC, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of advanced AI chips.<\/p>\n
Four of the defendants violated Taiwan’s National Security Act \u200bby intending to use trade secrets outside Taiwan, the court said, adding that images of the information were found on the Japanese company\u2019s cloud system.<\/p>\n
JAIL FOR FORMER TSMC, TOKYO ELECTRON EMPLOYEES<\/p>\n
Chen Li-ming, a former employee of both TSMC and Tokyo Electron, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while terms ranging from two to six years were handed to three other former TSMC employees.<\/p>\n
The court also gave a former Tokyo Electron \u200cemployee a 10-month sentence, suspended for three \u2060years, for destroying evidence. The defendants could appeal against the decision, it added.<\/p>\n
“We take the court\u2019s finding with the utmost seriousness,” Tokyo Electron said in a statement after the court faulted its Taiwan unit for \u2060having violating supervisory obligations.<\/p>\n
The case dates from August 2025, when prosecutors indicted Chen of unlawfully obtaining trade secrets, along with other defendants, in a bid to help Tokyo Electron win more equipment orders from TSMC.<\/p>\n
TSMC, which makes chips for Nvidia<\/a>, Apple<\/a> and Google, among many others, did not immediately \u200brespond \u200bto a request for comment.<\/p>\n SECRETS RELATE TO 2-NM PROCESS TECHNOLOGY<\/p>\n The trade secrets \u200brelate to TSMC’s 2-nanometre process technology, the industry’s most \u200cadvanced in terms of both density and energy efficiency, the company says on its website.<\/p>\n Taiwan has classified sub-14 nanometre semiconductor technologies as critical national core technologies covered by strict legal protections.<\/p>\n Chen was among four of the five individual defendants to plead guilty, as did the Taiwan unit of Tokyo Electron.<\/p>\n One other defendant, also surnamed Chen, admitted to some charges, including reproducing the information, but he did not admit to intending to use it outside Taiwan.<\/p>\n The court said the information reproduced without authorisation involved TSMC’s A14 process, a more advanced chip \u200ctechnology key to maintaining the company’s global leadership position.<\/p>\n Tokyo Electron and its Taiwan \u200bunit had reached a settlement with TSMC, the court added.<\/p>\n It ordered that TSMC \u200breceive T$100 million of the fine, with the rest \u200bpaid to Taiwan’s state treasury within one year of the ruling becoming final.<\/p>\n TOKYO ELECTRON SAYS NO ORGANISATIONAL INVOLVEMENT<\/p>\n In \u200cMonday’s statement, Tokyo Electron said neither Monday’s ruling nor \u200bthe prior investigation found any organisational \u200binvolvement by the company or its Taiwan unit, with no external leakage of the confidential information identified.<\/p>\n The company said it had agreed in discussions with TSMC on enhanced measures to protect trade secrets, and the case had no impact on \u200bits financial results.<\/p>\n In December, Taiwan prosecutors said they \u200chad charged the Tokyo Electron unit with violating the National Security Act and the Trade Secrets Act after Chen \u200bwas indicted in August for alleged theft of the trade secrets.<\/p>\n Shares of TSMC closed up 3.7%.<\/p>\n ($1=T$31.4110)<\/p>\n (Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee; \u200bWriting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Clarence Fernandez)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Wen-Yee Lee NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 27 (Reuters) – A Taiwan court fined the local unit of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8,52,6851,10539,1883],"class_list":{"0":"post-12556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tokyo","8":"tag-japan","9":"tag-tokyo","10":"tag-tokyo-electron","11":"tag-trade-secrets","12":"tag-tsmc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}