Apple Sues Former iPhone Chip Designer For Violating Employment Terms By Starting Nuvia

Apple is suing ex-employee Gerard Williams III, a chief architect behind the iPhone and iPad microprocessors, for breaching his contract. Apple claims that Williams founded his own chip-design company Nuvia while he was still working at Apple and that he recruited Apple employees to work at the startup.

The suit will be held at California's Santa Clara Superior Court on Jan. 21 next year, with the case being originally filed in August.

Williams spent nine years with Apple. He left in February to start Nuvia, which reportedly secured $53 million in funding in November.

Apple has called Williams' actions a "worst-case scenario" for the tech giant.

"This case involves a worst-case scenario for an innovative company like Apple: A trusted senior director with years of experience, and years of access to Apple's most valuable information, secretly starts a competing company leveraging the very technology the director was working on, and the same teams he was working with, while still employed by Apple," Apple says in the introduction of the lawsuit.

In court documents responding to the lawsuit, Nuvia said that Apple "has filed this lawsuit in a desperate effort to shut down lawful employment by a former employee … To further intimidate any Apple employee who might dare consider leaving Apple, Apple's complaint shows that it is monitoring and examining its employees' phone records and text messages, in a stunning and disquieting invasion of privacy."

Nuvia recently opened new offices in Austin, Texas, which will accommodate as many as 75 employees and utilize semiconductor engineering talent in the region. Employees at the startup have also worked at Google and Intel, in addition to Apple.