Of these, Olgado, the engineering director of Product Business, worked in the field for almost 20 years, apparently because of the dismissal from the company in 2013, while the other three resigned as far back as the end of 2012.
The four ex-engineer engineers allegedly volunteered to download huge amounts of information, including 16,000 drawings, from the company's internal engineer database between July 2000 and December 2012 and store it in personal Google Drive; Most of these data involve a technique that is so important in today's semiconductor process, called "metalorganic chemical vapor deposition" (MOCVD).
A spokesman for Applied Materials said in a statement that Applied Materials actively protects its intellectual property from theft or illegal use and we support legal action in this criminal case to ensure that anyone who illegally acquires our trade secrets is brought to justice .
The indictment states that the stolen technology involved a complex process of forming crystalline layers on so-called metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) chips, which Applied Materials spent millions of dollars developing through years of research and testing. Applied Materials's Paragon project developed a consumer product called NLighten, and four suspects were accused of trying to copy the product.
The indictment states that between around July 2000 and December 2012, four suspects conspired to steal MOCVD technology and used it to create a competing company called Envision, which they plan to open in the United States and China. People used a personal e-mail account description program, which instructed lower-level employees to help them download confidential material and then stored it on their Google Drive account.They also acquired MOCVD technology from the company's California-based office entity.