Chip design software house, Avant! Corp, has been ordered by a Californian court to halt the sale of its Aquarius software product line following long term allegations by rival Cadence Design Systems Inc that Avant!’s products contain stolen code. Avant! says it will appeal against the preliminary injunction, but in the meantime, the company has been ordered to halt all further sales of Aquarius and to cease user support for the product within 60 days. The ruling follows a similar injunction (dated September 1997) taken out against Avant!’s ArcCell product, the predecessor to Aquarius. Cadence, which has been fighting this case for over three years, immediately hailed the injunction as a major victory and a crippling blow for its rival. For its part, Avant! said the injunction would cause minimum inconvenience because the old Aquarius product line had already been superseded by a newer product, called Apollo, in January this year. However, Avant! acknowledges that Aquarius still has users, and the court’s ruling orders these users to immediately destroy the software, or to return it to Avant! for destruction. More problematic could be the additional clause that bars Avant! from selling any products which help to translate existing customer files from Aquarius to Apollo if these products also contain disputed ‘stolen’ code. Cadence has kindly offered to support any Avant! customers who need transition assistance during this process, while adding that it will now pursue allegedly stolen code within Avant!’s current Apollo product range. Cadence’s statement on the latest court ruling maintains that that the court found strong evidence of Avant’s copying Cadence source code and that Avant’s use of Cadence code constitutes trade secret misappropriation. The court has also partially lifted a stay halting a civil case against Avant! from proceeding, filed by Cadence back in December 1995. This case had originally been halted pending the resolution of a criminal case against certain Avant! employees based upon the same evidence. The civil case will claim damages of over $1bn arising from lost business. In trading on Tuesday, Avant! Corp shares fell 4% to $15.18 while Cadence rose 0.2% to $30.
