Huawei accused of scheme to steal semiconductor technology from US start-up to help China achieve tech dominance
The allegations were made in a countersuit in response to a Huawei complaint filed last year accusing CNEX of stealing its trade secrets
A former Huawei employee has accused the company of trying to steal intellectual property in order to help China achieve technological dominance over the US by using a lawsuit against his Silicon Valley start-up.
In a court filing, the former employee, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, said the litigation was “the latest in a long line of underhanded tactics” by China’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment.
Huawei and its FutureWei unit sued Huang and his start-up CNEX Labs last December, accusing Huang of making off with sensitive trade secrets related to semiconductor technology that uses integrated circuits as memory to store data.
Huang was hired as an engineer by FutureWei in Santa Clara, California, in January 2011 and left two years later to form CNEX, where he is the chief technology officer.
Huang, in an 80-page response filed on Tuesday, said Huawei got it backward – he was hired so the Chinese company could take control of his inventions for Solid State Disk Non-Volatile Memory and then, after he left, sought to obtain proprietary information from his new company.
Huawei and FutureWei have served as critical participants in a corporate espionage campaign