Former Intel employee pleads guilty to stealing chip secrets

Bloomberg reports Biswamohan Pani, 36, of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for stealing $200 million to $400 million worth of information from his former employer, Intel, in 2008.

Pani stole secret documents about Intel's chip manufacturing and design, and intended to use the data to advance his career at AMD or someplace else when the opportunity arose.

Pani, an employee of Intel's Massachusetts Microprocessor Development Center, working on the design of Itanium processors, is said to have resigned from Intel on May 29, 2008, and took leave from Intel up to June 11, purportedly to use accrued vacation time.

Pani however joined Intel's rival Advanced Micro Devices on June 2, while still on Intel's payroll, and continuing to have access to Intel's servers. He returned to Intel on June 11 for an exit interview on what was to be his last day at Intel, according to his indictment in 2008.

From June 8 through June 11, Pani downloaded 13 "top secret" Intel design documents from the company's servers in California, according to the indictment. He copied them from his Intel-issued laptop to an external drive to have access to the documents after he returned the laptop to Intel. He is said to have tried to access the servers again around June 13 after he found that he could not access the documents offline because he had not completed the procedure required for viewing the encrypted documents offline.

The investigation concluded that AMD neither requested the information that Pani had stolen from Intel, nor knew that Pani had taken or would take the information. Pani faces as long as 20 years in prison for each of the five fraud counts he committed.