Apple to settle a trade secrets lawsuit with chip firm Rivos
Two years after initially accusing the semiconductor startup Rivos of stealing trade secrets, Apple has chosen to reach a settlement with the business. In a document made public on Friday, Rivos and Apple told the judge that they want to reach a settlement by March 15.
In May 2022, Apple filed a lawsuit against the “stealth-mode” business, alleging that Rivos had stolen engineers’ access to proprietary corporate data. In its case, Apple said that former workers had taken confidential data throughout the hiring process at Rivos’ request.
According to Apple’s lawsuit, “Beginning in June 2021, Rivos initiated a concerted effort to target Apple employees who had access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information regarding Apple’s SoC designs.” The engineers allegedly took “gigabytes of sensitive System-on-a-Chip specifications along with design files,” according to Apple.
In September 2023, Rivos retaliated by filing a lawsuit of its own against Apple, claiming that the latter was used coercion and other strategies to prevent its engineers from quitting. Apple and Rivos stated in a document obtained by Bloomberg on Friday that they intend to resolve the legal dispute and are presently working to finalize their agreement:
According to the complaint in federal court in San Jose, California, “the agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities.” “The parties are going through that process right now.”
Apple quietly dropped a lawsuit it had brought against former executive Gerard Williams III in April 2023. Williams was credited with being instrumental in the creation of Apple Silicon’s chips, high-performance A-series, and M-series products. Williams had quit from Apple in 2019 to launch Nuvia, a server chip startup that Qualcomm eventually bought in 2021.
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