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China poaching TSMC - Do you even try to stop?

soAsian

Active member

I can't find any English article so here's a google translated.

It look like the former employee is high level because his salary is 7200000 NTD. that's 256200.41 USD. that's pretty high in Taiwan.

Do you even try to stop China poaching? Does NDA even matter anymore? I'm pretty sure the Chinese will pay off all his legal fees/penalties...etc.

I know you can't stop people from leaving and take their knowledge with them. so what does foundry like TSMC/Samsung do to protect their IP?

I remember Daniel mentioned you can't really stop people from taking their knowledge with them. SMIC got caught because they downloaded TSMC's documents.

Is this the new Chinese approach? poaching key people instead trying to steal docs(?)
 
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Poaching people has always been the best way to get semiconductor IP out the front door. The semiconductor industry is infamous for this. Remember the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight ?

TSMC is actively combatting this by keeping the secret sauce compartmentalized so no one person knows enough to do real damage. Other companies are doing the same but TSMC is really focused on security in the FinFET era. NDAs now have many more pages and much more force, which is why we can no longer send GDSII to multiple fabs and get the same design. At 28nm and above GDSII was freely exchanged like trading cards.
 
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