In a reversal of roles, the one where it is the young startup that steals information from the giant, Apple filed a complaint against Rivos on April 29 for the theft of confidential information, according to the agency. Reuters. The suspicious company was born in 2021 and claims on its site to be in “Stealth Mode”, stealth mode.
Silicon Valley and its ruthless universe
Accusations, suspicion of theft of intellectual property, are almost part of the daily life of the digital economy, nevertheless the case of Apple is more unprecedented: a startup of barely a year would have recovered data from Cupertino to develop a system competitor.
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In this case Apple accuses Rivos of having pilfered the manufacturing secrets of its SoC, or system on chip. It is an integrated circuit composed of several elements, such as memory, microprocessors, graphics processing units, etc.
To carry out this blow, David would have stolen from Goliath more than 40 former employees, including many engineers specialized in the design of SoCs. This is again a great classic of Silicon Valley, where brains are a precious and eagerly sought resource.
Apple’s complaint names two of his exes who allegedly left with gigabytes of confidential information in their wallets. Obviously, thousands of documents would contain manufacturing secrets of the Apple brand SoCs. Other employees would have taken information and even tried to erase their visible traces on their Apple devices.
Apple wants us to give it back what is rightfully itss
For Apple, Rivos has implemented a deliberate strategy to poach its engineers to seize 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 lawsuit filed in a California federal court, Apple demanded that Rivos be restrained from using its confidential information, demanded that its former employees return company assets and damages in the undisclosed amount.