Startup Rivos faces an army of Apple lawyers; According to the iPhone maker, Rivos stole a large amount of confidential information about SOCs. Not only that, Reuters writes that the startup will deliberately seek out former Apple employees to gain access to protected information. The billion-dollar company hopes to receive a “reasonable royalty” for its use of trade secrets.
According to Apple, former employees who switched to Rivos played a dirty game with some unethical and even illegal actions. For example, classified documents have been transferred to private devices and cloud accounts. The suspects are also said to have exchanged secrets via encrypted messaging services and are trying to erase traces of these actions on company devices.
Two former employees are named in the file, Bhasi Kaithmana and Ricky Wen. Together, they would copy over 390 gigabytes of design drawings and technical specifications from existing and never-released Apple SOCs, including the M1, onto their USB sticks and PCs.
Rivos calls itself ‘startup’. hiddenmode” and is basically a direct competitor to Apple. The company wanted to develop its own SOCs, but for this it would hire Apple employees to contribute to the design, whether information protected or not.
Among other things, Rivos would misuse Apple’s trade secrets regarding M1 socs to develop its own chipsets.
Sources: Reuters, court document
Source: Hardware Info
