An ex-employee of ASML, the Dutch semiconductor manufacturer and sole supplier of EUVL machines to the world, was recently handed a three-year prison sentence for sharing company secrets with a contact in Russia.
As per the Netherlands judiciary site, De Rechtspraak, the defendant had copied information from both ASML and NXP systems, accessing specific information at times, but primarily about microchip production lines. Investigators reportedly found a “large amount of files” from the two companies, over various data carriers at his home, collected over several years.
The ex-ASML employee was originally sentenced by the Rotterdam District Court to serve a four-year sentence but was reduced due to a lack of proof that they stole data in an act of financial gain. Adding to the problem is the fact that several of the confidential files were ones that shouldn’t have been accessible to the defendant, given his job scope and position in ASML at the time.
To state the obvious, Russia is a small fry in the world EUV manufacturing and semiconductor productions but has previously declared that it plans on developing such chipmaking tools that would produce such critical components cheaper, as well as easier than the likes of ASML. And while the information that was provided may now be considered old or outdated, sensitive information from the world’s most advanced lithography machines are still a gold mine.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
