Text/Wang Xinxi
Recently, the Shanghai police successfully detected a case of infringement of chip technology trade secrets, and the infringing company was Zunpai Communications, which plagiarized and stole Huawei's HiSilicon chip design. Behind the case of infringement of Huawei's chip technology, the domestic technical talents left to start a business, sounding the alarm bell of intellectual property rights.
Zhang Kun, the founder of Zunpai, and Liu were two executives of Huawei HiSilicon, Zhang Kun, the founder of Zunpai, has worked in Huawei for ten years and achieved the level of Huawei's 21-level professional and technical experts, Zhang Kun was originally in Qualcomm, and later switched to Huawei, responsible for the research and development of RF-related chips.
In February 2021, after Zhang Kun resigned from HiSilicon, he established Zumpai Communications before the non-compete agreement expired, and then recruited a number of R&D personnel from HiSilicon to his company by paying high salaries and equity payments, and instructed the R&D personnel who switched jobs to steal chip technical information by excerpting and taking screenshots before leaving.
After identification, 40 technical points of the infringing chip technology are more than 90% identical to the secret points of the trade secrets of the rights company, constituting substantial sameness.
Behind the commercial theft case of Zunpai Communications
As we all know, semiconductors are the core battlefield in the Sino-US science and technology war. After a large number of domestic enterprises were sanctioned, the domestic market soon ushered in a wave of "domestic substitution". Domestic capital has seen business opportunities, and a large number of institutions have rushed to it.
Under the boom of 2020~2021, start-ups with the blessing of capital began to poach people frantically, and the treatment of chip design practitioners was rapidly raised.
As the only company in mainland China to enter the top 10 of the world's semiconductors, Huawei HiSilicon has been the de facto leader in independent chip design for a long time, and has naturally become the focus of headhunting.
According to sources in the chip industry, at that time, Huawei was cut off from advanced process foundry, and the output of HiSilicon's huge team was rapidly reduced. Even with Huawei's ultra-high R&D investment and strong strategic determination, it is somewhat difficult to maintain HiSilicon's huge team on an annual basis.
Therefore, Huawei's efforts for HiSilicon employees to change jobs or go it alone are basically smooth sailing.
However, as a professional engaged in technology, it is impossible for Zhang Kun not to know the issue of non-compete agreement, that is, he cannot do technical work of peers within a few years after leaving the original company, and normal companies will sign relevant confidentiality agreements, but Zhang Kun's behavior is seamless, and the company got an angel round investment of 100 million yuan as soon as it was established, and in the second year, it received a round of investment from investment companies including Skyline Capital and Gaorong Capital, especially his business scope involves "technical consulting, technical exchange, and technology transfer" Therefore, the industry speculates that behind it is the support of capital and interest groups, and it has been prepared for a long time.
At that time, some companies that wanted to make small chips directly took the HiSilicon team into a system and took it away and redid it at a new company, which was extremely efficient.
But the crux of the matter is that Zhang Kun has worked at HiSilicon for so many years, and he can be regarded as a technical talent in the industry. As long as you give more people, give some time, and form a team seriously, you should be able to make your own WiFi chip, how did you fall to the step of copying it as it is? Especially the similarity with the original technology is as high as 90%, and it can be speculated that 10% of the modification is to avoid control.
Moreover, stealing Huawei's trade secrets, there are only a few similar technologies in the world, how bold do you have to be to feel that it is okay to steal it?
Then the only explanation is that there are enterprises or capital parties that guarantee the bottom and give promises, such as a big deal to fight a patent war, which can be delayed for a few years, and it is a big deal to lose some money. Either they are in a hurry with financing pressure.
Behind this, Zhang Kun undoubtedly also saw this outlet of WiFi chips. From the perspective of the industry, WiFi chips are not small chips, but related to national security. Represented by the WiFi Alliance, WiFi upgrades are being driven across the supply chain. WiFi standards are moving from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6, WiFi 6E, WiFi 7.
Zhang Kun once told the media: "The upgrade from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6 is a big leap, which brings unprecedented new challenges to the digital, analog, RF and software design of the corresponding chips, which means that these domestic manufacturers of router AP chips are almost all at the same starting line." As for which company can break through in the future, it depends on who can be the first to deliver stable and reliable high-performance WiFi 6 AP chips in the coming days. ”
From the perspective of international and domestic trends, WiFi will become a part of the national basic network in the future, and the four giants that currently control the router AP chips are from the United States and Taiwan, China, which brings uncertainty to the future supply of the mainland in the current geopolitical competition.
In the eyes of the industry, at that time, Zunpai Communication, which was co-founded by Zhang Kun, also rapidly grew into a dark horse in the WiFi chip track, and Zunpai Communication also wanted to seize the domestic substitution outlet, bigger and stronger, and today, this dark horse has appeared as a prototype.
Give technical talents to leave and start a business, and sound the alarm bell of take-it-or-leave-it
In fact, this incident has given domestic technical talents to leave and start a business, sounding the alarm bell of intellectual property rights.
We should support the normal exchange and delivery of talents in the semiconductor industry, and we do not want to see any large companies abuse non-compete agreements, all of which need to be established on the premise of legal compliance.
From the point of view of Zunpai Technology, 90% of the 40 technical points are consistent, which cannot be said to be exactly the same, and they are also highly similar. After all, in the process of chip research and development, the design, manufacturing, and testing are divided into several different companies to complete, and the sense of confidentiality is very strong, and under this research and development system, it is impossible for original products to be 90% consistent.
Judging from this case, the means of stealing are excerpts and screenshots, so it is necessary to pay attention to how to define the setting of the similarity of technical secrets for technical talents to leave their businesses. For example, the engineer draws a system block diagram on scratch paper to analyze whether it is an excerpt, how to distinguish intentional stealing, and how to separate it from the original company's products and technologies, which require technical talents to leave and start a business.
The technical threshold required for the design and development of Wi-Fi chips is very high, from a global perspective, Huawei's Wi-Fi chip technology patents account for 22.9% of Huawei's total, ranking first in the world, many of which are not even Qualcomm, Apple and other giant enterprises, this kind of technology related to national strategy, in fact, involves national security issues, large-scale theft and plagiarism of this technology, whether there is the involvement of international capital behind it, it is difficult to say. But for the founders, once they embark on the wrong path, it is too late to regret it.
This case also makes us reflect on the current situation of the protection of domestic chip intellectual property rights, and the case may not be a case, and the identification of this kind of non-direct plagiarism of technical secret infringement requires high technical ability, if it is not for the command of the Ministry of Public Security, Shanghai and Nanjing police to cooperate and co-organize, this kind of case may be a lawsuit if it drags on. Therefore, in the case of theft and plagiarism of technical secrets, the domestic identification standards and technical identification methods should be further advanced and made typical.
From the perspective of great power competition, the chip battlefield is a battlefield of "winning and losing, but also deciding life and death", and it is also a key link in the future scientific and technological competition to seize the commanding heights, and there will be many similar cases in the future.
Many domestic employees of multinational companies steal designs, but the headquarters is not in China, and there is no way to file a case in China, so in many cases, technical intellectual property rights are stolen, and they can only suffer dumb losses.
Therefore, judging from the cracking of the Zumpai Technology case, one of the trends behind this is that, on the one hand, it allows multinational companies to see the determination of domestic intellectual property protection, and at the same time, it also allows practitioners to have a clearer identification of technology trade secret infringement.
From the perspective of the chip industry, there were too many opportunists in the past, wasting a lot of talents, funds and time opportunities, from the trend point of view, the Zunpai chip technology trade secret case, undoubtedly also sounded the alarm bell of technology take-it-ism, technology plagiarism and theft, it is possible to ruin the reputation of a company and its founder, and the era of respecting intellectual property rights may have come.
Author: Wang Xinxi, Senior Reviewer of TMT This article is not reproduced without permission