On July 30, according to market sources, four former TSMC engineers—Chen Liming, Wu Bingjun, Ge Yiping, and Chen Weijie—were sentenced by the Taiwan Intellectual Property and Commercial Court in the first instance to 10 years, 3 years, 2 years, and 6 years in prison respectively for stealing and leaking confidential data including 2-nanometer process technology. Chen Liming and Chen Weijie appealed, but the Taiwan Supreme Court rejected the appeal on the 30th, and the two will be directly sent to prison. According to reports, Wu Bingjun and Ge Yiping did not appeal after the first-instance verdict, and the prosecution also did not appeal, so their sentences were finalized first. Chen Liming originally worked as a yield engineer at TSMC's Fab 12. After leaving, he moved to Tokyo Electron (Taiwan), a supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to TSMC, to work in the marketing department. In an effort to perform well and secure more equipment supply positions for Tokyo Electron in TSMC's advanced process nodes, he repeatedly leveraged his former colleague relationships with Wu, Ge, and Chen, asking them to photograph TSMC's confidential files. The four engineers used the work laptops of the still-employed involved engineers to open confidential files for Chen Liming to photograph, or they photographed and transmitted the files to Chen Liming.