But Taneja admitted in the plea agreement that he and his co-defendants had decided they wanted to benefit personally from the invention rather than turn it over to Qualcomm. So they came up with a plan to hide Arab’s involvement in a startup that said it owned technology that technically belonged to the chip maker.
Qualcomm was tricked into agreeing to pay $180 million for technology that it technically owned
Qualcomm did not know that its employee had created the technology it had purchased because it was said to have been invented by a Canadian graduate student working for the startup. Arabi’s younger “sister” acted as the student and was listed as an inventor in the provisional patents even though her brother filed the patent applications using fake email accounts to hide his identity.
Acting US Attorney Andrew R. Hadin: “Fraud and deception undermine legitimate businesses and the marketplace, whether they are victimized by small businesses or multinationals and their shareholders. This office will seek justice against offenders, both big and small.”
Qualcomm is a fables chip manufacturer which means that while it designs its own chips, it does not have the facilities to manufacture them. Thus, the company relies on contract foundries such as TSMC and Samsung Foundry, and has used these two companies to manufacture its Snapdragon line of application processors. Currently, TSMC is building Qualcomm’s current chipset, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.