AUSTIN, Texas — Motorola Inc.'s semiconductor products sector and Intel Corp. announced an agreement to settle a lawsuit Motorola had filed which claimed that Intel was hiring away Motorola microprocessor design engineers.
The settlement is expected to be finalized within two weeks, and both parties expressed "satisfaction" with the settlement. A hearing on the lawsuit had been scheduled for June 1 in an Austin district court. The suit claimed that Intel was acquiring Motorola's trade secrets by hiring key design engineers.
The dispute had its origins last summer, when Motorola set up a system-on-chip technology center, and put Mark McDermott — formerly Motorola's top manager at the Somerset design center for PowerPC development — in charge of the technology portion of the SoC development center.
When Motorola shifted the SoC effort somewhat, McDermott quit. Intel quickly hired McDermott and set up an Intel microprocessor development center in Austin.
McDermott, with intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the Motorola design team, hired perhaps a dozen of Motorola's key designers to the Intel site.
Keith Diefendorff, an analyst with Micro Design Resources (Sebastopol, Calif.) and a former MPU designer at Motorola, said last month that "it wasn't that Intel hired so many Motorola engineers. It was the fact that they really went in and hired the key people, the engineers that had the key knowledge."Motorola, in what was widely perceived as a legally dubious effort, filed suit claiming a violation of Motorola's trade secrets. But the effort apparently succeeded.
"We accomplished what we set out to do," a Motorola spokesman said, when asked if Intel had agreed to stop hiring Motorola designers.
