In May 2022, Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple is Suing Rivos, a RISC V startup, for Violation of the Trade Secrets Act due to Former Engineers Stealing Sensitive Chip Technology+." The report noted that Apple had sued a RISC V startup by the name of Rivos Inc. that is based in Santa Clara California and Austin Texas for (1) Breach of Contract, and (2) Violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Apple's California filing stated that Apple brought this "action to prevent Rivos and its employees from exploiting Apple’s most valuable trade secrets to compete with Apple unlawfully and unfairly." Later, Apple states that "Former Apple Employees Leaving for Rivos Retained Apple Confidential and Proprietary Trade Secrets After Accepting Offers from Rivos."

The complaint before the court further noted that the former employees left and joined Rivos after stealing “highly-sensitive” proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s “system-on-chip” designs, including its M1 laptop and A15 mobile phone chips.

It was reported yesterday that U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose said Apple had “sufficiently identified” a trade secret and alleged “sufficient harm” by Rivos and three former employees. 

The former employees left and joined Rivos after stealing “highly-sensitive” proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s “system-on-chip” designs, including its M1 laptop and A15 mobile phone chips, according to the complaint.

The judge rejected Rivos’s request to dismiss a Defend Trade Secrets act claim as well as a breach of contract claim against five former Apple employees.

The dispute revolves around “system-on-chip” technology that shrinks multiple computer elements into a small chip, which Apple says it has invested billions of dollars in to make its devices more powerful.

Prior to Apple's lawsuit against Rivos in 2022, Patently Apple had posted a report in September 2021 titled "Apple is Reportedly Designing Various Embedded Subsystems across all Operating Systems using RISC-V."

Friday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila proved that Apple's work with RISC-V was quite advanced and the stolen Trade Secrets could translate to sufficient to Apple's future chip solutions.

This past June we also posted a report titled "A Major Tectonic Shift away from Arm to RISC-V may be in the works for Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Nvidia and Apple." The report revealed the importance of RISC-V to the future of the tech industry. We also now know that Apple's modern M and A-Series processors included RISC-V technology to make that point.