Engineer accused of cheating area firm

A former design engineer for a Fremont semiconductor company was indicted Monday in federal court in San Jose on charges he illegally steered stolen trade secrets to contacts for a rival company in Taiwan.

FBI agents arrested Shin-Guo Tsai, 35, of San Jose on Sunday night.

He appeared before U.S. Magistrate Patricia Trumbull in San Jose on Monday morning.

He was charged with one count of foreign transportation of stolen property, according to an unsealed criminal complaint.

Tsai worked as a design engineer for Volterra Semiconductor Corp. of Fremont from 2002 until Feb. 15 of this year, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the complaint.

The affidavit alleges that, in December, he e-mailed proprietary data sheets belonging to Volterra to contacts from a potential competitor, a software design company in Taiwan.

Trumbull ordered that Tsai be held in custody until a detention hearing at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, said U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Luke Macaulay.

If Tsai is convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The prosecution is the result of an FBI investigation overseen by the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.