In early April, the details of a spying scandal involving ASML's intellectual property became available to the public in the Netherlands. One of the largest publications in the country that a certain group of attackers stole ASML technology secrets and handed it over to the Chinese authorities. Since ASML develops and produces equipment for the production and testing of chips, it is understandable both the potential interest in it from China and the concerns of the entire civilized world arising from this.
If we discard the speculation and speculation of the Dutch journalists, it turns out that none of those involved in the theft of ASML technologies worked for the Chinese government. Several ASML employees left the US division of the company and took with them certain software tools for working with photomasks. Based on illegally obtained intellectual property, XTAL was created with the involvement of Samsung capital. Last about 30% of the shares of XTAL and planned to become a client of this software tool developer. On this, the South Korean manufacturer could save money on the purchase of software of similar functionality from ASML. But it didn't. ASML sued XTAL in the US and won.
At the end of last year, a verdict was issued that XTAL should pay ASML a fine of $845 million. In November 2018, the jury ruled that the defendant was in a state of bankruptcy and could not pay the amount sought. The final meeting on this issue took place only last week. How in ASML, the Superior Court of Santa Clara County in California ruled that XTAL's intellectual property would be awarded to the Dutch company in lieu of monetary compensation. XTAL developments will become part of Brion's ASML tools - packages and solutions for working with lithographic equipment, preparing for printing and subsequent quality control. This means that the allegedly stolen ASML intellectual property ended up in good hands, and the final product came out no worse than the original developer.
Source: 3dnews.ru