jimmysmitty :
wemakeourfuture :
I see merit in their case. Enough to be presented before the courts. If trade secrets were taken the punishment should be severe and swift. Of course there will be appeals, but if found in violation of the law a strict judgement must be made.
Stealing IP from another company is a very serious matter for business and there's should be zero tolerance for this behavior.
I would like to know what trade secrets they are. USB has been around for a long time and last I checked, the majority of motherboards use ASMedia for additional USB controllers, I know for sure ASRock does normally.
USB is a pretty common standard and besides a few new technologies in USB 3 it has the same backend in the standard.
I doubt there were any trade secrets that VIA had that no one else had for USB. If it was some coprocessor then I would agree they have a case but I think they are just upset they lost people to Asus.
A trade secret is any sort of intellectual property which is normally carefully protected and withheld from competitors or the general public. The trade secrets aren't the USB standards documents, they are the design documents detailing NEC/Renesas's USB 3.0 host controller.
USB 3.0 is a massive departure from USB 2.0, and neither Asus nor any of its subsidiaries had any involvement or experience in that market. As a member of the USB-IF Asus will have access to all of the necessary standards documents and patent licencors to develop their own compliant host controller, but there's no reference design which they can simply copy and implement on their own. In fact, The NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 host controller was one of the first commercially available host controller than met the specification. It wasn't the greatest controller, the ASMedia one in my desktop is undoubtedly better than the NEC/Renesas one in my laptop, but it was one of the first to market.
It's extremely hard to bring even a simple ASIC revision to market within a year, much less a whole new design. NEC is alleging that when Asus acquired a bunch of former Renesas employees they took with them sufficient design information that Asus was able to perform the logical equivalent of going from 0 to 100 in 2.5 seconds. Even having naturally acquired employees experienced in the trade, it should still have taken Asus more than a year to bring a brand new USB 3.0 host controller to market.
It's impossible to prevent employees from taking their experiences with them, but the law does provide civil and criminal remedies when employees take company property such as design documents with them. It's also often unlawful to poach key employees for the purposes of obtaining trade secrets through the sum of the individuals themselves even if the employees do not commit theft on their own.