Chinese professors accused of trade secrets theft

Six Chinese men have been accused by US authorities of stealing trade secrets covering mobile phone technology.

In a court document filed last month, but which has only just been made public, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has claimed that the men stole trade secrets from their former employers, US-based technology companies Avago and Skyworks, and then attempted to file patents using the technology.

The trade secrets cover bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters, used to eliminate interference in connections between mobile devices and signals, and film bulk acoustic resonators (FBAR), which are used in mobile phones to detect incoming and outgoing wireless signals.

Three of the accused individuals worked at Tianjin University in China.

Alongside their positions at the university two of the men, Wei Pang and Hao Zhang, founded a company called Novana.

The DoJ said that Novana was created “in part to appear to be the legitimate source of trade secrets stolen from Avago and Skyworks”.

Between 2006 and 2009, Pang was employed by Avago. In the same period Zhang worked for Skyworks, which sold most of its patents covering BAW and FBAR technology to Avago in 2009.

In 2009, both Pang and Zhang left their roles at the companies and took up full-time positions as professors at Tianjin University.

The DoJ has claimed that, from 2006, both men came up with a scheme to “knowingly steal, and without authorisation appropriate ... obtain trade secrets belonging to Avago and Skyworks”.

In 2010, Zhang filed for seven US patents covering the alleged stolen technology and listed himself as the sole inventor.

In the same year, Zhang and Pang filed for Chinese patents covering the same technology but included both their names in the application.

“By filing for the patents Pang and Zhang disguised the fact that they had stolen technology from their respective employers, which enabled them to present themselves to potential investors and suppliers as the developers and owners of that stolen intellectual property” the court document said.

To support the claims, the complaint included a series of emails between Zhang and Pang that were sent between 2006 and 2009 highlighting alleged conscious actions to steal trade secrets.

At one point, the participants in the exchange jokingly name a company to receive the patents as “Clifbaw”, which Pang explains to mean “China lift BAW technology”.

The other four defendants—Huisui Zhang, Jinping Chen, Zhao Gang and Chong Zhou—have been charged for their role in allegedly facilitating the stealing of trade secrets. So far, only Zhang has been arrested.

Neither Avago nor Skyworks had responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

The six men could not be reached for comment.