Apple settles lawsuit that accused start-up from stealing its SoC trade secrets and engineers،
The settlement will allow Apple to scour Rivos' systems and retrieve any confidential information it finds. The two companies also said in the filing that they “signed an agreement that could potentially settle the matter.” The filing also asks the Court to “continue to stay this action and vacate all outstanding deadlines until March 15, 2024, by which time the parties expect these activities to be completed.”
Apple initially sued Rivos in 2022 and accused the Mountain View company of hiring dozens of Apple engineers while using confidential Apple information to create “system-on-a-chip” (SoC) technology to compete with Apple. SoCs combine multiple computing components into a single chip, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU).
Apple to settle lawsuit against Rivos for stealing trade secrets related to Apple SoCs
In its complaint, Apple complained that it spent billions of dollars and more than 10 years of research to develop its SoC designs that Apple said “revolutionized the worlds of personal and mobile computing.” For his part, Rivos denied Apple's allegations and claimed that the iPhone maker “sought to punish Rivos and any Apple employees who may seek to work there since the moment Apple became aware of the startup promising.” Rivos sued Apple last September, accusing the tech giant of “unfair competition.”
In the original suit, Apple claimed that “beginning in June 2021, Rivos began a coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple's proprietary information and trade secrets about Apple's SoC designs.” » Apple accused its former employees of using USB drives to transfer data to their personal laptops. Additionally (and somewhat ironically), some information was stolen from Apple through the use of Apple's AirDrop feature which allowed files to be sent to the personal iPhones of employees who left Apple for Rivos.
