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TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process
- faeyanpiraat 1y agoThis article was just the headline repeated in various forms with some generic filler So strange
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoWhen there isn't any info but you have to turn in 400 words to your editor/get paid by the word...
- jihadjihad 1y agoI love that there is the headline, an intro, a heading for a section about the iPhone 18, and then another heading titled "TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets", which is literally a word-for-word substring of the headline.
- never_inline 1y agoAt least, it doesnt look like chatgptese.
- dortlick 1y agoThere is literally no indication in the article that this has anything to do with apple other than them being a potential user of the TSMC 2nm process. Strange they tried to connect this story to apple.
- SilverElfin 1y agoYep. It doesn’t detail what was stolen, how they were found, if they’re arrested right now, or who it is suspected they are working for. Useless article beyond the headline.
- delroth 1y agoIt's nice to see TSMC's internal security teams are detecting these things, but it would be more surprising news if this kind of IP theft wasn't happening to be honest...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoOnly the bad criminals get caught.
- mschuster91 1y agoReminds me of the now-infamous "capacitor plague" [1] of 1999-2007 that keeps cropping up in electronics repair. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
- gus_massa 1y agoI guess you got downvoted because the connection is not obvious. The relevant paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Implications_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Implications_... is > [...] A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan [...]
- sgarland 1y agoTIL! The only time (knock on wood) I ever had a motherboard go bad was an MSI from around 2002, due to a blown capacitor. To their credit, MSI had great support at the time, and sent me a new one after I sent a photo of the blown capacitor.
- voxadam 1y agoAsianometry has an interesting video on the topic titled What Happened to the Capacitors in 2002? [1] [1] https://youtu.be/rSpzAVpnXo4 https://youtu.be/rSpzAVpnXo4
- ants_everywhere 1y agoIndustrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against these days.
- monkeyelite 1y ago[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoWe are doing much better off with the status quo than TSMC firing everyone who isn't of the same religion, and even then, it's not hard for a spy to pretend to be <insert religion here>.
- monkeyelite 1y ago> We are doing much better off I’m not making a value judgement. I’m making a prediction about material conditions. > TSMC firing everyone who isn't of the same religion I didn’t say that. But circles of a trust around important information. > it's not hard for a spy to pretend to be <insert religion here>. Yes it is.
- bitzun 1y agoCan you explain why? I have pretended to be multiple kinds of Christian with success despite being none of them.
- monkeyelite 1y agoBecause religious vocabulary, etiquette, and clothing are learned from decades of involvement usually as a small child. It’s kind of like saying you’re going to pretend to be a different class, but more particular. > I have pretended to be multiple kinds of Christian with success I don’t know what context you mean. But I guarantee others can tell you aren’t a member of the group even if Christianity aims to be open in inviting new people. Another common situation is they recognize you have some connection but can tell you aren’t an active participant.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- KaoruAoiShiho 1y agoLocally in Taiwan, there’s growing suspicion that the 2nm process technology was leaked to Japan’s Rapidus. People are questioning whether the technology was leaked to Rapidus through Japanese equipment suppliers.
- AnonMO 1y agomake no sense since Rapidus 2nm process is from IBM.
- tonyhart7 1y agoidk which shocking, Japanese company try to steal TSMC or IBM have 2nm process out of nowhere
- speed_spread 1y ago"Out of nowhere" would be a stretch. IBM may not have mass-market volume anymore but they kept up the production chain to build mainframes (and I would guess other "specialty" products) for institutional customers.
- tonyhart7 1y ago[flagged]
- protimewaster 1y agoIBM has been publicly working toward 2nm since at least 2021, though, so it doesn't seem like it's coming from nowhere. Unless this is a completely different 2nm development, here's a presser about it from 2021, titled "Introducing the world's first 2 nm node chip" (https://research.ibm.com/blog/2-nm-chip https://research.ibm.com/blog/2-nm-chip)
- tonyhart7 1y ago
- simpleintheory 1y agoThe original link from Nikkei Asia that the 9to5mac article is a repost of has some more information and less generic filler: Link: https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/tsmc-fires-workers-for-breaching-data-rules-on-cutting-edge-chip-tech https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/tsmc-fires-worke... Archive: https://archive.ph/ta1kq https://archive.ph/ta1kq
- sgarland 1y agoRight before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was absolutely terrible, like < 1 MBps. My department had some large files, so that was fun. One such file was an Excel file that was more script than anything else. We had to have labels in a specific format on every machine we owned in the fab, which was something like 250 of them. The normal stuff like its id number, and also which points of contact for a technician and engineer, as well as their photos and phone numbers. Manually balancing and re-balancing every time a shift gained or lost an employee would’ve been obnoxious, so naturally instead countless hours were spent coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info, extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty fun to watch, honestly. I think I also had created a floor plan map somehow, and it would do its best to group a given technician’s assigned machines such that they minimized distance traveled during inspections. Anyway, the large file size was due to it caching the headshots (might have made a hidden tab for each? I don’t remember) for better performance, as that had proven to be a bottleneck.
- gedy 1y agoNice ha. Your story reminds me of why I flinch whenever I hear "just give them the spreadsheet, engineer, don't argue..."
- hbarka 1y agoAt least they didn’t make you use Sharepoint and OneDrive. How fun using VBA and ODBC in 2019, proving the mighty Excel will go on as the new MS Access.
- ryanjshaw 1y agoThis abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.
- 1y ago
- metalman 1y agoGrandpa worked heat treat at the alegany national forge, where they made stuff like the beams for the empire state building, periscope tubes, and the 16" guns for the biggest battle ships, each thing had to be tempered in a very specific way, and to deal with spying and espionage, the charts and instuments used on the shop floor were all deliberatly wrong,and the written instructions were also wrong leaving the person in charge to know how to convert the given instructions into what was actualy done through a secret method, not complicated, but essentialy impossible to reverse engineer. There is a story of soviet engineers who somehow were invited to tour the RR jet turbine factory, and were given shoes that had extra sticky soles they wore only for the tour, which ewere then used to anyalise the metal chips that get picked up from the shop floor..... never ends, expected.....even honored
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoCould someone help contextualize what parts of this manufacturing process are considered the most important and closely guarded trade secrets? I'd love to hear some slightly more concrete examples. How easily could another company replicate this process if they knew all the key details? It was my understanding that access to photolithography machines was one of the major obstacles in replicating chip manufacturing processes.
- zozbot234 1y ago> Could someone help contextualize what parts of this manufacturing process are considered the most important and closely guarded trade secrets? There's way too many fine details to even begin to list. Modern chip fabbing is the closest thing on the planet to actual dark magic, and the difficulty only rises exponentially with every new fabrication node. Literally any part of this could be considered a "trade secret" if it's not already described publicly as part of patents, academic research or both.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoGee, I wonder which nation-state actor was orchestrating this...
- bilbo0s 1y agoThey claim it was Japan. More specifically, Rapidus.
- karakot 1y agoI always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? Why not just a state or a country? USA is not a nation-state, or UK, or India, or Russia, etc. Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it?
- matthewbauer 1y agoHard to know what OP meant, but I took it as an oblique reference to China.
- karakot 1y agoWell, is China a nation-state or a multi-national state, or essentially just a country(state)? English is my third language, so I just wonder do I miss some nuance here.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoNew Jersey is a state. I do not think that they have the wherewithal to attempt such. Scotland is a country, but I don't think their occupiers would allow them to try. Granted, it is an awkward term, and I too wish there was a better one. >Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it? It's not clear to me that Russia can summon the ambition. But point conceded.
- overfeed 1y ago> I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? It's a shibboleth, similar to HN favorites: "orders of magnitude" and "orthogonal". Shibboleths are often social signifiers, sociology has lots of research on why people use them
- epistemovault 1y agoSo even if someone steals the secret sauce, does that mean they can actually cook the same dish?
- amelius 1y agoNo, but if you want to cook the same dish it sure helps to have the secret sauce.
- mrheosuper 1y agoWhen you have secret sauce, the next thing to do is hiring the right cook, which is much easier to do.
- theodric 1y agoSerious props to TSMC for having the processes in place to catch this or figure it out, sacking the alleged bastards, announcing the insider breach publicly (and accepting the consequences of a moment of corporate vulnerability, but at the same time showing their transparency and commitment to protecting client IP), and further not allowing mere job loss to be the end of the story. I had no particular opinion about TSMC, but my respect for them has moved up a notch now.
- ge96 1y agoMy probably-racist sounding comment or nationalistic is my concern for software being owned by a certain entity and then this group is going to be used for the foundation of AI with our military, it will be interesting to see how that turns out. edit: in this case someone pointed out it's a different nation so I'm surprised
- quyleanh 1y agoThey said [1] in article but put iPhone 18 chip process just for clickbait… Disappointed. [1] No details have been shared on the nature of the information obtained. It is likely that it relates to the 2nm process in general rather than anything specific to Apple’s A20 chip.
- amelius 1y agoFunny thing is that Apple doesn't know how to make an iPhone.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoHow big are all of the design files for a modern chip? 10MB? 100gig? Billions of transistors, but surely a lot of compressible redundancy. Not that I think you can just plug in a thumb drive and download as you please, but just a sense of scale on how much data describes the design.
- seanw444 1y ago> Not that I think you can just plug in a thumb drive and download as you please Why not? It's just data, and a thumb drive stores data. As long as it fits.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI meant that plugging in a thumb drive and downloading the company jewels is sure to be noticed. I was hoping for something a tad more clandestine. USB storage devices on my corporate laptop are auto mounted as read only and need policy exceptions to be able to write.
- j_walter 1y agoThis was not just from a thumb drive as that is very tightly controlled at TSMC (they did catch someone right away before it got leaked). The employees were caught printing info and removing it from the company (caught due to magnetic ink setting off the metal detectors) as well as using phones to take pictures of their laptop info while connecting from offsite. Taking pictures of remote laptops is a more covert way, but both employees were caught through suspicious pattern analysis and review of access logs of people right before they quit the company.
- xadhominemx 1y agoTSMC practices compartmentalization. The entire recipe is never stored in one place.
- 0xTJ 1y agoI'm confused about the iPhone 18 part; I assume that it would just be one of their usual processes, possibly with a few tweaks.
- j_walter 1y agoThe iPhone 18 part is for clicks...it really has nothing to do with the iPhone 18 and everything to do with TSMC's N2 process.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoHard to feel bad for Apple when a lot of this is about locking customers out of their own devices and then cheaping out with contract manufacturing. I almost want to cheer on the employees doing this.
- chasil 1y agoHave we topped Micron? https://www.freethink.com/the-changing-world-order/chinese-industrial-espionage https://www.freethink.com/the-changing-world-order/chinese-i...
- OfficeChad 1y ago[dead]