recent years<\/a>, including a near 40% increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Demand for its products soared along with the global boom in artificial intelligence, and both\u00a0Vicor and Monolithic want their components used in building those products.\u00a0<\/p>\nAMD did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did attorneys for Vicor and Monolithic.<\/p>\n
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Austin is not home to either company. Monolithic is headquartered in Washington state and\u00a0Vicor in Massachusetts, but the alleged illegal deeds were done in the Texas capital city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Austin connection<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where Derek Lee and AMD\u2019s Austin lab come in.<\/p>\n
Monolithic says it hired Lee away from Vicor last July in San Jose, Calif. He requested to be moved with his family to Austin so he could work directly with AMD, the company says in court records. After he moved, he was in AMD\u2019s local lab almost every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Shortly after starting, the new complaint says, Lee began accessing confidential data that didn\u2019t have to do with his job.<\/p>\n
That led to Vicor suing Monolithic early this year for allegedly infringing its patent on power converters it included in systems for\u00a0AMD, Monolithic said.\u00a0Vicor filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission and attempted to get Customs officials to stop products with Monolithic\u2019s converters in them, including\u00a0AMD AI accelerators, from entering the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Monolithic calls Vicor\u2019s complaint spurious. It accuses its adversary of using incorrect, but confidential, data to build its case. It said Vicor is conflating the specifications of a never-released power converter with one it built for AMD. It alleges Lee gave Vicor a sample converter.<\/p>\n
The same month as the complaint, Monolithic claims, Lee began downloading more data to his company laptop computer. He resigned Jan. 28 and said he was moving back to California.<\/p>\n
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Monolithic says a forensic investigator went to his house to retrieve the laptop. The company also asked to image his iPhone to ensure no company information remained there, but Lee declined.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It wanted to look because it alleges that, in the 48 hours before he resigned, Lee downloaded more than 80 gigabytes of company data. An affidavit from a forensic investigator says Lee\u2019s phone and several\u00a0USB drives were connected to the device throughout his tenure at the organization, implying that data was transferred to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNotably, however, (Monolithic)\u00a0does not allege in the petition, (1) that any purported trade secret information was transferred from Lee\u2019s MPS-issued laptop to any external device,\u201d Lee\u2019s attorney said in court records.\u00a0Later filings from Monolithic say Lee transferred data related to AMD products via Bluetooth in one instance and sent himself data via Gmail in another.<\/p>\n
It also alleged Lee never moved his family to Austin and never intended to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe timing of Lee\u2019s employment and the filing of the lawsuit suggests that Vicor encouraged Lee\u2019s actions in order to obtain information that Vicor could use for its own litigation and business advantage,\u201d Monolithic says in its federal lawsuit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It sued Lee individually in state District Court in February for trade secret misappropriation and sought an injunction to prevent him from sharing any confidential data.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A pawn in the feud?<\/p>\n
Lee denied the allegations, saying he didn\u2019t misappropriate anything and calling it a \u201cbad-faith\u201d claim.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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In court filings,\u00a0Lee\u2019s attorney portrays the engineer as a pawn in a larger feud between Monolithic and Vicor. He says Monolithic is using the case against Lee to get ammunition for its case against\u00a0Vicor and has asked the court to make Monolithic specify what trade secrets he took.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince filing suit, MPS has not provided any specificity regarding the supposed \u2018trade secrets\u2019 in Lee\u2019s possession forming the basis of its claim,\u201d Lee\u2019s\u00a0attorney said in court filings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Monolithic Power Systems filed its federal lawsuit against Vicor on July 7. While Lee is not a party to the suit, his name peppers the filing, expanding the allegations made in the suit against him.<\/p>\n
It says Vicor\u2019s actions or \u201cwilling\u201d blindness has already caused Monolithic to lose business from\u00a0AMD, which switched to alternative suppliers when Vicor attempted to stop its converters from entering the country. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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It also raises the possibility that Vicor\u00a0may be developing something to rival its components in an attempt to supplant them as a vendor, or to extort through licensing deals.<\/p>\n
Monolithic is alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference for both existing and future business and deceptive practices. It is seeking unspecified damages for the lost business as well as an injunction against\u00a0Vicor using its data, attorneys fees and damages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin American-Statesman Mark Matson for American-Statesman ( 6\/3\/16) AMD is located at 7171 Southwest Parkway. Austin American-Statesman The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-379640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}