Electronic Voyeur Network Report (Text/Wu Zipeng) According to reports, on April 4 local time, Jinhua defense lawyer Jack DiCanio said that the prosecution did not have enough evidence to prove that Jinhua knew or intends to jointly steal the technical and trade secrets of Micron with , and Jinhua will apply for acquittal.
This is another breakthrough progress in the "UND Jinhua case" since UMC settled with Micron in November 2021.
It can be seen through the official website of Jinhua that the company began to defend its innocence against the charges it had been held in the Northern District Court of California on January 10, 2019. In a statement, the company said it would present the case to the court to prove that its business has always adhered to the highest standards of integrity.
Source: Jinhua official website
"UniDianjin Jinhua case" all the time
The whole incident will start with the establishment of Jinhua. On February 26, 2016, Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Jinhua) was registered and established, jointly funded by Fujian Electronic Information Group and Jinjiang Energy Investment Co., Ltd. In Jinhua's introduction at that time, the company invested US$5.65 billion to carry out technical cooperation with UMC to establish a 12-inch memory wafer production line in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province.
Then in 2017, UMC Vice President Chen Zhengkun became the general manager of Fujian Jinhua, who once worked in a subsidiary of Micron Taiwan. In September 2017, Micron issued a statement saying that employees who had switched from Micron to UMC stole Micron's DRAM intellectual property and were suspected of leaking Micron's DRAM technology to UMC to help UMC develop 32nm DRAM. In December 2017, Micron officially sued UMC and Jinhua for infringement of its intellectual property rights and trade secrets in the US federal court in California.
In the lawsuit between Micron and China Mobile and Jinhua, in addition to mentioning Chen Zhengkun, there were two other engineers who switched from Micron to China Mobile. In the lawsuit filing, Micron said its Taiwanese company found that a departed employee downloaded the company's technical secrets and used data erasure procedures, which were handed over to Jinhua via UMC.
Faced with Micron’s lawsuit, UMC and Jinhua chose to counterclaim. At present, the official website of Jinhua still retains the news content of "Jinhua resolutely defends its own rights and interests and filed a lawsuit against Micron's infringement." This news shows that Jinhua submitted a complaint to the Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court on January 19, 2018, requesting that Micron immediately stop infringing on Jinhua's patents.
Source: Jinhua official website
At the same time, according to reports at the time, due to technical infringement, Jinhua also requested that 26 Micron products be banned in China.
On October 29, 2018, the US Department of Commerce included Jin Hua on the "Entity List". The U.S. Department of Commerce said that Fujian Jinhua has been producing DRAM using technology suspected to be imported from the United States, which may threaten the ability of US chip suppliers to sell products used in high-tech systems to the U.S. military. Therefore, US Secretary of Commerce Ross announced that Fujian Jinhua will be included in the export restrictions list, and the ban officially came into effect on October 30.
According to people familiar with the matter, on October 30, 2018, technicians from Applied Materials, Lam Research, and Axcelis evacuated from Jinhua, and the production line equipment entered a shutdown. At that time, these devices already had the ability to produce small batches of thousands of wafers and . According to Jinhua employees' subsequent interviews, the production line is almost one quarter away from successful research and development and successful production. However, Jinhua is still on the US "entity list", so this batch of purchased equipment has not been started.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice also filed judicial lawsuits against UMC, Jinhua and several people, including Chen Zhengkun, one of which was charged with economic espionage. Once the crime is established, the prosecutors including Chen will face a maximum of 15 years in prison for economic espionage and a fine of $5 million, while UMC and Jinhua will face a sky-high fine of up to $20 billion.
In fact, UMC has issued a statement of "innocence" in technology, "The research and development of DRAM process technology is a special project approved by the Taiwan Investment Review Committee in advance. It is a research and development team composed of more than 300 engineers based on its own technology (most of which are UMC experienced R&D personnel) that work together to take more than two years to independently develop DRAM processes and retain relevant R&D records. We hope that DRAM R&D talents and R&D results trained by this process can be retained in Taiwan." UMC mentioned in the statement.
However, after Jinhua was included in the "entity list" by the United States, UMC quickly announced the suspension of its DRAM plan with Jinhua. It can be said that before the US Department of Commerce took action, the lawsuit between Micron and Jinhua was still at the level of business competition, but after the ban, it was obvious that the balance was biased towards Micron. In addition, UMC, which had been tied to Jinhua before, quickly withdrew from the dispute.
In January 2019, Jinhua submitted a letter to the US Department of Commerce, requesting that the "entity list" be removed.
News in November 2021 proved that UMC finally compromised and chose a "reconciliation" and announced a global settlement agreement with Micron. Both parties will withdraw their lawsuits filed with each other. According to the agreement, UMC will pay a confidential settlement amount to Micron in one lump sum, and the two parties will create opportunities for commercial cooperation.
Many people talk about "hatred" when talking about the Jinhua incident, but according to Jinhua defense lawyer Jack DiCanio, among the people involved in the UMC and Jinhua projects, some of them did take away Micron's technical information. "Some engineers may have taken away some Micron information when they came to work for us, but our management did not know that." UMC told Jinhua after the Micron lawsuit.
But UMC also had a guarantee at the time that if these employees who later joined UMC had stole Micron's secrets, these secrets would not be used in the DRAM project developed for Jinhua.
Considering UMC's position in the semiconductor market, its statement is very credible, but it does have a "demolished population" incident. Therefore, it can be said that Jinhua, which has almost not received technical benefits, has been "behind the gun". The reason behind it is also obvious. The US government is very happy to follow the situation and attack Jinhua, even though there is no evidence in UMC's more than 6 million documents.
htmlOn December 28, Jinhua pointed out in a document: "Although Taiwan Lianhua Electronics Co., Ltd. gave full cooperation after pleading guilty more than a year ago, and the US government can freely access UMC's documents, the United States has not found any document, email or witness testimony in the more than 6 million documents presented so far, which reflects that there is an agreement between Lianhua Electronics Co., Ltd. and Jinhua to steal or improperly obtain Micron's confidential information."
However, the news that is unfavorable to Jinhua is that although UMC's documents show that Jinhua may be innocent, the US government will still summarize it as a "bad enterprise" and continue to implement the "entity list".
The last effort Jinhua needs to make is to defend his guilt and ask the US Department of Commerce to remove it from the "entity list", but considering the current environment, the possibility of the latter is relatively slim.
What is the current situation in Jinhua?
ZTE , Huawei , SMIC and other companies have shown that the "entity list" of the US Department of Commerce has a powerful blow to technology companies. ZTE was once paralyzed, and Huawei could only sell 4G smartphones in the 5G era. Although there are rumors about SMIC 7nm, there has been no progress...
So, what is Jinhua, who has been included in the "entity list" of the US government for three years, is in?
At present, there are two public news that can see the situation in Jinhua. One is the official news of the Fujian Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology . In an article titled "Fujian: High-tech Manufacturing Leads the "Counterattack" of the above-scale industries", it was mentioned that Quanzhou Jinhua successfully developed a 25nm memory chip with independent intellectual property rights and made small batch trial production.
Source: Fujian Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology
The technical details mentioned in this news have been improved compared with the 32nm memory chip mentioned when Jinhua was established, but it is not yet certain whether it is the process level when the equipment is shut down.
Another news was disclosed to the public by Jinhua’s official website. The company rented out its warehouse and issued an announcement.
Source: Jinhua
Then, an obvious fact is that under sanctions, Jinhua only has equipment but cannot be activated and cannot form large-scale mass production. As time goes by, Jinhua will have a bigger gap with Hefei Changxin and Unigroup Guoxin in terms of technology and product progress.
Postscript
Jinhua incident made me think that technology is a bit like "rootless water", so many people talk about Jinhua, where is the root of technology? Under the previous trend of globalization, the significance of this discussion was not highlighted, but the current confrontation between China and the United States, as well as the sanctions against Russia by Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, shows that technology has borders and the risk of "research and development outside" is very high. Therefore, even if Jinhua escaped from this lawsuit, he still has to rely on his hopes to break away from the US government's "entity list" and then want to compete with Hefei Changxin and Unigroup Guoxin at the same level at the same level as domestic DRAM, which is a bit weak.
