AfterDawn: News

AMD claims former managers stole secrets, before joining Nvidia

Over 150,000 documents allegedly involved.

AMD has filed a lawsuit against four former managers, alleging that they operated a spying ring within the company, before eventually jumping ship and joining major rivals Nvidia. The graphics chipmaker filed the lawsuit in a Massachusetts district court this week.



"This is an extraordinary case of trade secret transfer/misappropriation and strategic employee solicitation," the filing reads.

"Thousands of AMD document or electronic files have been taken from its facilities by employees leaving to work for a primary competitor in the graphics business Nvidia Corporation."

Specifically, AMD claims that former manager Robert Feldstein downloaded license agreements, strategic plans and his corporate Outlook e-mail files to external devices. Along with another colleague, Richard Hagen, Feldstein allegedly recruited two more AMD employees who were willing to participate.

Manoo Desal allegedly brought over a 200-file database of AMD's technological work and development from its Perforce file management system, and Nicolas Kociuk copied over 150,000 files within two weeks before he resigned at AMD.



Written by: James Delahunty @ 16 Jan 2013 18:43

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• 5 comments

• molsen

  Yet no one at AMD bother to exit interview him? Better still, why not check on downloaded emails. Naive on AMD's part.

  17.1.2013 13:11 #1

• A5J4DX

  hah
  

  17.1.2013 17:39 #2

• Tarsellis

  Not sure I buy it. Sounds like more grasping to excuse their floundering. Besides, I haven't seen any evidence of this in Nvidia's products.
  
  Unfortunately AMD has lost their edge, is making stupid "innovations" and generally has earned their poor stock performance, and is probably pulling an apple to keep floating.

  18.1.2013 20:44 #3

• TrinUK

  Originally posted by Tarsellis: Not sure I buy it. Sounds like more grasping to excuse their floundering. Besides, I haven't seen any evidence of this in Nvidia's products.
  
  Unfortunately AMD has lost their edge, is making stupid "innovations" and generally has earned their poor stock performance, and is probably pulling an apple to keep floating. No evidence in the hardware yet..... No doubt the chip technology if valuable will be reworked to cover up any signs of industrial theft.
  

  Trin - Making Digital Waves

  21.1.2013 04:52 #4

• WierdName

  Originally posted by TrinUK: Originally posted by Tarsellis: Not sure I buy it. Sounds like more grasping to excuse their floundering. Besides, I haven't seen any evidence of this in Nvidia's products.
  
  Unfortunately AMD has lost their edge, is making stupid "innovations" and generally has earned their poor stock performance, and is probably pulling an apple to keep floating. No evidence in the hardware yet..... No doubt the chip technology if valuable will be reworked to cover up any signs of industrial theft. The hardware wouldn't show up relatively overnight either. The lawsuit says July 2012 but nVidia would have to look over the documents and identify useful optimizations. I think the likely result of this, if true, would be small optimizations showing up in nVidia's chips from concepts extracted from the documents which would make proving theft very difficult if not impossible.
  

  Doesnt expecting the unexpected make the unexpected expected and therefore mean youre expecting the expected which was the unexpected until you expected it?
  "Opinions are immunities to being told were wrong." - Relient K

  21.1.2013 17:57 #5