Security News > 2022 > September > Ex-Broadcom engineer asks for house arrest over IP theft

A former Broadcom engineer who pleaded guilty to stealing his ex-employer's trade secrets has asked the court not to give him prison time, saying he stole the files for reference, fearing he would "Be unable to keep up" with "More technical and younger engineers" at a new startup.

According to the filing, Peter Kisang Kim worked for Broadcom for 22 years before he accepted a job in 2020 at a Chinese networking chip design startup called Mersenne Technologies, where his role was design verification director.

Kim, who initially pleaded not guilty when he was indicted in November last year, changed his plea in May this year, accepting a deal acknowledging he had copied Broadcom trade secrets in the form of files related to design specs for networking chips used in datacenters.

He went on to state that after development meetings at his new employer, "He occasionally looked at the Broadcom files to see if he could get insights into what the engineers were talking about. Typically, the files proved unhelpful because there was just too much data."

Kim's team also added that the files, which he took "As a crutch if and when he needed one," would not have been practically useful because Broadcom appears to have used customized Perl scripts for its datacenter ASIC designs, where Mersenne's devs used Python.

His lawyers went on to say that it was an "Exaggeration" to say "Kim singlehandedly threatened the 'national security of the United States'," as Broadcom had earlier claimed.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/09/15/broadcom_engineer_ip_theft/