Analog Devices allegedly falls prey to IP theft
In this case Haoyang Yu, a Chinese born, naturalized US citizen living in Lexington, Massachusetts, was arrested and Tricon MMIC LLC which was set up by Yu and his wife also charged, according to the US Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts.
It is alleged that while working for ADI, Yu downloaded hundreds of schematic design files and modeling files that belonged to ADI and copied portions of those files into spreadsheets which he uploaded to his personal Google drive account.
The USAO states that in March 2017, Yu and his wife established Tricon MMIC LLC (Arlington, Mass), a company that, according to its website is a fabless design house that specializes in MMIC amplifier designs using GaAs and GaN technologies. The USAO goes on to say that since creating Tricon, Yu has marketed and sold as his own approximately 20 chips based on ADI designs, and has used the same foundry wafer fab as ADI to get them made.
Yu targeted ADI parts that had been made obsolete and supplied replacement parts with specifications identical to or substantially similar to parts from ADI, the USAO said.
Yu has also allegedly used Tricon to illegally export several parts to Spain by concealing both his name and the export control classification number of the parts being exported on the shipping documents. ADI, the named victim of Yu’s theft of trade secrets, has been cooperating with the government throughout this investigation, the USAO said.
According to the indictment Yu was born in Harbin, China, and first came to the US in 2002 on a student visa. He became a lawful permanent resident in June 2009, and a naturalized US citizen in March 2017. In July 2014, Yu started working at ADI as a principal design engineer. He worked on the design of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), which are used in radio, cellular, and satellite communications as well as defense and aerospace applications.
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