Several former high-ranking engineers from Apple have been hired by Rivos. Rivos describes itself as a startup in stealth mode, and according to Apple, Rivos stole chip trade secrets.
The lawsuit that was filed last Friday accuses Rivos of hiring more than 40 former Apple employees over the course of the past year to work on system-on-chip technology that competes with Apple's own A-series and M-series.
Apple claims that at least two former engineers tookgigabytes of sensitive chip specifications and design files during their last few days at the company. Rivos is accused of launching a campaign to target employees with information about Apple's designs.
"Stealth mode" startup Rivos, which was founded to design and market its own competing SoCs, has filled out its ranks with dozens of former Apple engineers. Starting in June 2021, Rivos began a coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information about Apple's SoC designs. Apple promptly sent Rivos a letter informing Rivos of the confidentiality obligations of Apple's former employees, but Rivos never responded.
The employees who stole information used AirDrop to transfer sensitive Apple material to their own personal devices, as well as stealing presentations on unreleased chips and saving them to their cloud accounts. Apple believes that Rivos communicated with some employees through messaging apps, and that the former Apple workers who participated in the theft of information tried to wipe their Apple devices to hide their tracks.
In the lawsuit, Apple said that it had no choice but to file a lawsuit because of the amount of information taken, the nature of the information stolen, and that the employees are performing the same duties for a competitor with ongoing access to some of Apple's most valuable trade.
Kaithamana, one of the specific employees accused of data theft, allegedly copied thousands of Apple documents containing proprietary and trade secret information over the course of a week in August 2021. He copied the files on his work computer before he transferred them to ausb drive, and Apple's lawsuit goes into detail about the specific data that he collected.
A second employee that is accused of stealing information transferred a large amount of data from his Apple-issued computer to a personal hard drive before he left the company. He accessed proprietary data just before the file transfer, and stole information on both current and undiscovered SoCs.
Between July 26, 2021 and July 29, 2021, Mr. Wen transferred approximately 390 gigabytes from his Apple-issued computer to a personal external hard drive. Among the data transferred are confidential Apple documents describing Apple trade secrets, including aspects of the microarchitecture for Apple's past, current, and unreleased SoCs.
Other Apple employees who were not named in the lawsuit connected external hard drives to their Apple-issued computers, and were accessing Apple trade secret information about their designs.
Apple is asking for an injunction against the employees who joined Rivos to prevent them from continuing to leak sensitive data, compensation for the loss caused by trade secret misappropriation, and additional damages for Rivos gained from Apple's data. Apple is asking for a reasonable royalty rate from Rivos. We are likely to hear more from the Apple v. Rivos dispute going forward after Apple requested a jury trial.
The full lawsuit can be read on Scribd.
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