Apple is suing the former chief architect of its iPhone and iPad microprocessors, which resigned in February to co-found a data center chip design company.

In a lawsuit filed by the Santa Clara High Court of California, the Register records that the Cupertino giant claimed that Gerard Williams, CEO of semiconductor upstart Nuvia, violated Apple's employment agreement when setting up a new business.

Williams is responsible for the design of Apple's customized high-performance mobile compatible Arm custom processors for nearly a decade. He retired from iGiant in February as the head of the newly formed Nuvia. The startup officially retired from stealth mode at the end of November and claims to have raised $ 53 million in funding. It seems that attempts are being made to design silicon chips for data center systems, most likely Arm-based chips. It is now being sniffed with its plans and intentions.

The startup consists of a semiconductor engineer and enterprise software specialist. It was co-founded by former Google SoC architect Manu Gulati, who also visited Apple, Broadcom, and AMD, as well as former Google, Apple and AMD architect John Bruno, and Williams, previously Arm. Researcher and head of design at Texas Instruments. The company also includes former Red Hat chief arm architect Jon Masters, Intel marketing director Jon Carvill, and other talent across Silicon Valley.

Apple's lawsuit accuses Williams of concealing the fact that he plans to leave Apple and start his own business while still working at Apple, and uses his work to direct the design of iPhone processors to create his own new company. Crucially, attorneys at Tim Cook & Co claimed he tried to lure his former employer into firing employees. All of this allegedly violated his contract.

iGiant also believes that Williams has set up the startup and hopes to be acquired by Apple to produce future systems for its data center.

The document states: "Unfortunately, Williams did not take advantage of the technology he was developing for Apple, but secretly considered how to take advantage of the opportunity to use the technology from Apple."

"Williams boasted that he would use the technology he worked at Apple to set up a new company. He thought Apple" needs "and he thinks Apple has no choice but to buy."

Apple Corps is now injunction and demanding compensation for Williams for breach of contract and breach of fidelity.

However, Apple's position was challenged by Williams, who accused the Apple giant of doing something wrong.

Last month, his team countered [PDF], saying that Apple had no legal basis. The paperwork shows that in this case, Apple's labor contract terms were not enforceable under California law: they argued that the language constituted a non-competition clause, which was generally prohibited in the Golden State. As a result, they said, Williams was allowed to plan and recruit for his new career during Apple's tenure.

They also claim that the evidence in Apple's complaint, especially the text messages he exchanged with another Apple engineer and the conversation with his ultimate Nuvia co-founder, were illegally collected by the highly paranoid iPhone maker.

The document states: "Apple did not provide any indication that any of its employees had agreed to electronically record their text messages. Indeed, the complaint was completely free of allegations of consent or supported the facts of inference."

"So, in the face of the complaint, Apple Inc.'s collection of text messages from its employees is in accordance with [California law] and therefore cannot be used as evidence."

Neither Apple nor Nuvia commented on the matter.

The Apple v. Williams case was filed in August [PDF, a note to ourselves], although paperwork between the two parties is still ongoing. The hearing will be held at 9 am on January 21.

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