Former Broadcom Engineer Indicted for Trade Secret Theft

Former Broadcom engineer Peter Kisang Kim was indicted by a federal grand jury for stealing company trade secrets, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said. Kim, a resident of Ben Lomond, California, worked as a principal design engineer at Broadcom for two years and allegedly stole trade secrets on chips used in high-volume data centers, the U.S. Attorney's office said. The chips were stored in nonpublic document repositories restricted to Broadcom employees. Ten days after leaving the San Jose, California-based company, Kim started working for a China-based startup focusing on chip design and the market for networking chips, the indictment said. Kim allegedly used the Broadcom trade secrets on a newly issued company laptop. Kim is charged with 18 counts of trade secret theft and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release for each count.