A former SK Hynix employee will serve 18 months in prison after a Seoul High Court upheld the sentence for leaking trade secrets related to CMOS image sensor technology to a Chinese company. The employee, who worked out of SK Hynix’s China office, printed documents and took photographs of confidential materials stored on the company’s internal server. South Korea classifies CMOS image sensor technology under its industrial technology protection laws, which means leaking it isn’t just a corporate offense. A pattern South Korea is determined to breakIn a separate 2024 case, another former SK Hynix employee, a Chinese national, was initially sentenced to 18 months for stealing semiconductor manufacturing documents before taking a position at Huawei. Geopolitics meets corporate securityThe US has imposed sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductor technology bound for China.