A court in Taiwan sentenced Chen Li-ming (陳力銘), a former TSMC employee, to 10 years in prison for leaking corporate secrets on Monday. The case marks the first time that Taiwan has used the National Security Act to prosecute corporate espionage in the country’s crucial semiconductor industry.
Chen had previously worked as an engineer for TSMC, before leaving to join the marketing department at Tokyo Electron, a semiconductor manufacturing supplier for TSMC.
In August 2023, Chen met with his former TSMC colleague Wu Ping-chun (吳秉駿) in an external meeting room at the company’s corporate headquarters in Hsinchu. According to a summary of facts released by Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Court, Wu opened a file on his business laptop containing trade secrets related to TSMC’s 2-nanometer manufacturing process and allowed Chen to photograph them with his phone.
Chen’s intention, according to a press release accompanying his indictment in August 2025, was to use the information to refine Tokyo Electron’s etching equipment to better comply with TSMC’s 2-nanometer specifications.
Wu was sentenced to three years in prison Monday on national security charges.
Chen carried out a similar scheme at the private residence of Ko Yi-ping (戈一平), another TSMC employee, in May of last year. Ko used his laptop to remotely access a file containing corporate secrets and allowed Chen to take a picture.
Ko was also sentenced to two years in prison Monday for his role in the scheme.
The court said that while Ko’s actions threatened to cause TSMC to “lose its competitive advantage,” he was given just two years as a result of “making a significant contribution to clarifying the facts of the crime.”
The severity of the punishments reflects the government’s fear that corporate espionage could be used to slowly erode the strategically important dominance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. The fact that Tokyo Electron is a foreign-based company proved crucial to prosecution, even though Cheng worked at the company’s Taiwan branch.
Beginning in May 2024, Chen Wei-chieh (陳韋傑), another TSMC employee, borrowed the password of an unsuspecting colleague to access the company database so that he could send pictures of sensitive files to Chen Li-ming. Chen Wei-chieh was sentenced to six years in prison Monday.
In its explanation of the severity of Chen Wei-chieh’s punishment, the court invoked the sensitivity of the information that he stole.
“The trade secrets he reproduced without authorization belonged to the confidential information of the 14-angstrom process,” the court said, referring to a form of chip manufacturing one generation beyond the 2-nanometer process. “This is an advanced technology node for TSMC’s semiconductor process to move from the ‘nanometer’ to the ‘angstrom’ era. It is the key to continuing and maintaining its leading position in the world’s most advanced process.”
Taiwanese prosecutors are also in the process of investigating similar allegations against Lo Wei-jen (羅唯仁), a former TSMC executive who the company has accused of leaking trade secrets to rival chipmaker Intel, where he began working soon after leaving TSMC.
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