may involve affecting future product development
Apple recently filed a lawsuit against Rivos, a startup based in Mountain View, California, alleging that it systematically poached employees from Apple’s chip design department, and these poached employees even took away Apple’s unpublished chip design briefings content.
In addition to setting up its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Rivos also set up a research and development facility in Austin, Texas. Although its own business is currently operating in a confidential state, it has poached a number of Apple chip design employees and posted most of the vacancies on the LEVER job site. In terms of chip engineering, it is speculated that its business will also focus on processor products.
According to Apple’s lawsuit, it is believed that Rivos systematically poached specific Apple engineers responsible for chip design, and even contacted them through encrypted communication apps, so there was a situation of improper poaching.
Rivos was established in May last year and has been poaching Apple technicians since June last year. It is reported that more than 40 Apple technicians responsible for chip design have been recruited, and Apple has tried to inform these technicians that they have a duty of confidentiality. But there was no response from Rivos.
Apple alleges that Rivos is involved in asking these technicians to take away Apple’s internal chip design data before leaving, including using multiple USB drives to store relevant data on personal devices, and even some unannounced chip designs are transferred to the personal cloud , and some people back up their work computer data to a personal storage device through Time Machine backup, and delete the work computer data to obliterate the traces of private backup data.
In the content of the lawsuit, Apple emphasized that the lawsuit is to protect the secrets that have not been released to the public and avoid losses in future business development.