Testimony in an ongoing case, reported by Maeil Business, claims CXMT’s founders intended to copy Samsung’s Process Recipe Plan from day one. The witness is Jeon, a former Samsung engineer now in custody, who spent 28 years at the Korean company before joining the Chinese memory maker. He said CXMT’s CEO and CTO wanted the recipe information rather than a process of their own.
CXMT lacked research institutes and facilities at founding, Jeon said, making the theft a deliberate foundation of its strategy. Recipes hold the sequence of steps, etch and deposition conditions, anneals, cleans and implants, so they can compress node development time sharply. They do not, however, reveal the full transistor architecture, masks or layouts.
Independent DRAM development typically runs three to five years from device work to yield ramp, and closer to five years for a newcomer. CXMT shipped DDR4 on a 22nm-class node in 2019 and 18nm-class memory in 2023, a pace that has long raised questions about whether its early generations borrowed from Samsung knowledge. The engineer is behind bars and the case remains open.
