AMD believes that a former vice-president and three managers handed trade secrets to Nvidia, after they joined the rival firm.

AMD is taking four former employees to court, one former vice-president and three former managers from the firm's Boxborough plant, who left the company to go and work for rival Nvidia last year.

In a suit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District of Massachusetts, AMD accuses former vice-president Robert Feldstein, along with managers Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk and Richard Hagen, of taking more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets with them before the four left the company. The documents included information related to AMD technology and contracts with large and enterprise customers, according to the suit.

The court also sanctioned a temporary restraining order against the four former employees, ordering the preservation of any copies of AMD materials they may have.

AMD said it had "uncovered evidence" that the four had "transferred to external storage devices trade secret files and information in the days prior to their leaving AMD to work for Nvidia."

AMD claims the four were in breach of their contracts, trade secret laws and unfair competition laws, and violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.