CHINESE chipmaker Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. was cleared Tuesday of U.S. allegations that it stole trade secrets.

U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco found the company not guilty after a non-jury trial, according to an entry in the U.S. online court records system.

The U.S. Justice Department in 2018 announced an indictment against Fujian Jinhua, alleging it stole intellectual property from U.S.-based Micron Technology.

That same year, U.S. authorities added the Chinese firm to a list of entities that cannot buy components, software or technology goods from U.S. firms. Fujian Jinhua pleaded not guilty in 2019.

Chesney concluded that U.S. prosecutors failed to prove that the Chinese company misappropriated proprietary data from Micron, American’s largest memory-chip maker, that allegedly passed through Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) in a manufacturing deal with Fujian Jinhua.

UMC assisted the Justice Department in its case against Fujian Jinhua after pleading guilty in 2020 to trade-secret theft and paying a US$60 million fine.

Had the company been convicted, Fujian Jinhua could have faced a fine, as well as an order requiring it to forfeit chips and income derived from the allegedly “stolen technology,” according to a U.S. Justice Department statement when the case was first filed.

Micron said in a statement that it and Fujian Jinhua previously reached a settlement in which they agreed to drop all claims against each other. That includes a civil suit filed by the U.S. company the year before the U.S. Justice Department brought criminal charges against the Chinese firm.

The chips that were at issue in the Fujian Jinhua trial are dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, not the semiconductors that held up shipments of a wide range of products including cars and smartphones during a global supply shortage.

In 2018, Fujian Jinhua’s US$6 billion plant was within months of full-scale DRAM production, a critical step toward ending China’s reliance at the time on US$380 billion of annual chip imports.

That’s when the U.S. Commerce Department put Fujian Jinhua on its so-called Entity List for engaging in activities contrary to U.S. interests and filed the criminal case in San Francisco. The move by the U.S. Commerce Department blocked the company’s purchases of chipmaking gear, and stirred an exodus of American and European suppliers and engineers from Jinjiang, where Fujian Jinhua is based.

(SD-Agencies)