San Diego-based company purchased technology secretly created by engineer on its payroll
A former Qualcomm research engineer and three others have been charged for defrauding the tech giant of $150 million.
They were handed fraud and money-laundering charges after they allegedly tricked Qualcomm into buying technology that was secretly created by a research engineer on the San Diego-based company’s payroll, reported The San Diego Union-Tribune.
This happened after Karim Arabi, formerly vice president of research and development at Qualcomm, came up with a faster method for evaluating micro-processors during the “design for test” process while employed at the company.
All intellectual property that Arabi created while he was employed by the company belongs to Qualcomm, according to his terms of employment agreement. However, he and the three others hid his involvement in the creation of the method. They claimed that it was invented by a Canadian graduate student, reported the Union-Tribune, citing the indictment. The technology was being commercialized through a Bay Area startup.
A federal grand jury handed up the indictment in May, but it was unsealed only on Monday.
The graduate student was in fact Arabi’s younger sister, Sheida Alan, who was studying subjects generally related to inkjet printing, not semiconductor design, according to the indictment. Alan legally changed her name during the process. She was listed as the inventor on provisional patents, but the...
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