A Lexington man, his wife and the company they established have been charged in a 24-count superseding indictment in connection with the alleged theft of hundreds of files containing proprietary information from one of the largest public companies in Massachusetts, Analog Devices.
The office of Andrew Lelling, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, announced the superseding indictment on Thursday.
Analog Devices did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday night after the charged were announced.
Norwood-based Analog Devices Inc. (Nasdaq: ADI), a worldwide semiconductor company, is currently in the process of acquiring Maxim Integrated Products Inc. (Nasdaq: MXIM) in one of the largest acquisition of the year. The deal, reportedly worth over $20 billion, will increase headcount at Analog by nearly 50%. As of November last year, Analog Devices employed about 16,400 people worldwide.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts reported that Haoyang Yu, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Lexington, and his company, Tricon MMIC LLC, were charged with three counts of possession and attempted possession of a trade secret, two counts of smuggling, two counts of transporting stolen goods, one count of visa fraud, and one count of procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully. Yu and his wife, Yanzhi Chen, 22, also of Lexington, were also charged with three counts of wire fraud and aiding and abetting wire fraud.
Yu, also known as "Jack Yu," did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yu, who became a U.S. citizen in 2017, was employed by Analog Devices as a principal design engineer from 2014 to 2017, according to the indictment. As part of his job, he designed and developed parts of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) used in radio, cellular and satellite communications. While working for ADI, it is alleged that Yu uploaded copies of confidential schematic design and modeling files to his personal Google drive account.
Yu and his wife established Tricon approximately five months before he resigned from ADI. The company "specializes in wide-band, power and low noise MMIC amplifiers," according to Jack Yu's LinkedIn profile.
When he resigned from Analog Devices, Yu signed an agreement affirming that he had surrendered all proprietary information or data. Nevertheless, since creating Tricon in March 2017, Yu allegedly marketed and sold approximately 20 Analog Devices designs as his own, and even used the same Taiwanese semiconductor fabrication plant as Analog Devices to manufacture Tricon’s MMIC parts, according to the superseding indictment, according to prosecutors.
