Apple has reached an agreement with Rivos, the SoC company that it sued in 2022 for theft of trade secrets, reports Bloomberg. Rivos will submit to a forensic examination of its systems to remove any confidential Apple information.
Rivos hired more than 40 employees from Apple, including several former high-ranking engineers, leading Apple to file a lawsuit in May 2022. Apple accused Rivos of poaching employees and stealing chip trade secrets via those employees. Rivos is designing SoCs that would compete with Apple's A-series and M-series chips.
According to Apple, at least two engineers hired by Rivos took "gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files" during their last few days at Apple. The employees used USB drives and AirDrop to transfer sensitive Apple material to their own personal devices, and allegedly stole presentations on unreleased SoCs.
Apple asked for an injunction against the employees that joined Rivos to prevent them from continuing to leak sensitive data, and it sought compensation for the loss caused by trade secret misappropriation and Rivos' "unjust enrichment" at Apple's expense. Apple wanted a "reasonable royalty rate" from Rivos on future products, and had requested a jury trial.
Rivos and Apple are aiming to finalize their settlement by March 15, and are working through the remediation process.
Top Rated Comments
Instead, write personal code on your nights and weekends in the same language you're using at work, but aiming at a different application for the code. This way you have a code base to refer to when you're no longer on the project, and your former employer will have no rights to it.
Both sides probably decided to settle and move forward.
Double standard much at Apple? What? those rules apply to us too? Who would have thought?
If I were Rivos, and this turned out to be true, I'd fire those employees before they could do the same to me.