Apple has made the call to wrap up its trade secrets tussle with chip newbie Rivos, after a stretch of two years since kicking off the legal battle by accusing the company of swiping trade secrets. As per documents unveiled on Friday, both Rivos and Apple let a judge know that they plan to seal the deal on a settlement by March 15.
Apple filed the lawsuit against the "stealth-mode" startup in May 2022, alleging that Rivos poached engineers with access to secret company information. Apple's lawsuit claimed that former employees stole proprietary information at Rivos' request as part of the recruiting process. "Starting in June 2021, Rivos began a coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s SoC designs," Apple stated in the complaint. According to Apple, the engineers pilfered "gigabytes of sensitive System-on-a-Chip specifications and design files."
In September 2023, Rivos retaliated with its own lawsuit against Apple, accusing it of using intimidation and other tactics to dissuade its engineers from leaving.
In a filing reported by Bloomberg on Friday, Apple and Rivos announced their intention to settle the lawsuit and are currently working on finalizing their agreement: "The agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities," the filing in federal court in San Jose, California, stated. "The parties are currently working through that process."
In April 2023, Apple quietly withdrew a lawsuit it had filed against former executive Gerard Williams III, who played a critical role in the development of the high-performance A-series and M-series Apple Silicon chips. Williams had departed Apple in 2019 to establish a server chip startup called Nuvia, which was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm in 2021.
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