Federal prosecutors in San Francisco have charged a Chinese state-backed company, a Taiwanese semiconductor maker and three Taiwan nationals with conspiring to steal trade secrets from a U.S. semiconductor company.

In an indictment unsealed Thursday, the DOJ lawyers claim that Taiwanese semiconductor foundry United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) partnered with Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. Ltd. (Jinhua), a state-owned Chinese enterprise, to steal trade secrets of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, from Micron Technology. According to the indictment, Micron currently holds about 20 to 25 percent of the entire market share of DRAM, a widely used in technology in a variety of digital electronics that require low-cost, high-capacity memory.