In a role reversal, one where it’s the young startup that steals information from the giant, Apple filed a complaint against Rivos on April 29 for stealing confidential information, according to the agency Reuters. The suspect company was born in 2021 and claims on its website to be in “Stealth Mode”.
The Silicon Valley and its ruthless universe
Accusations, suspicion of intellectual property theft, are almost part of the daily life of the digital economy However, the Apple case is more unprecedented: a startup that is barely a year old would have recovered data from Cupertino to develop a competing system.
In this case, Apple accuses Rivos of stealing the manufacturing secrets of its SoC, or system-on-chip. This is an integrated circuit composed of several elements, such as memory, microprocessors, graphics processing units, etc.
To achieve this, David would have stolen from Goliath more than 40 former employees, including many engineers specialized in the design of SoCs. Again, this is a big classic of Silicon Valley where brains are a valuable and eagerly sought resource.
Apple’s complaint names two of its exes who would have left with gigabytes of confidential information in their bags. Obviously, thousands of documents would contain manufacturing secrets of the Apple SoCs. Other employees would have taken information and even tried to erase their visible traces on their Apple devices.
For Apple, Rivos has implemented a deliberate strategy to poach its engineers to grab these secrets and develop competing SoCs. Cupertino says it has spent billions of dollars and more than 10 years in research and development for SoCs that would have ” revolutionized the world of personal and mobile computing “.
In the complaint filed in a California federal court, Apple asked that Rivos be prevented from using its confidential information, demanded that its former employees return company property and damages in the undisclosed amount.
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