Turned out that Akhan Semiconductor had gotten into talks with Huawei about licensing the tech to the smartphone manufacturer. Akhan claims the technology is 6 times stronger and 10 times extra scratch-resistant than Gorilla Glass, the industry regular that generates about $3 billion in annual sales for Corning Inc. The company provided Samsung and Huawei with samples of the glass. An soon sample of the Miraj Diamond Glass was shipped to Huawei’s lab in San Diego however there was an agreement that the glass would not be cut into two. This is typical practice to avoid any possibility the the company’s engineers will reverse engineer the glass process if it is cut into two. But, after the glass was returned to Akhan, there were signs the glass had been cut into 2 and some fragments were removed. The US start-up then lodged a formal complaint with FBI and that culminated in the sting operation at CES 2019. The entire operation is documented in Bloomberg’s report which you can find on the source link below.
Huawei is not a newbie to this kind of accusation of intellectual property theft. It hs often had this kind of toga hanging on its neck. In 2002, Cisco Systems Inc. accused the company of stealing source code for its routers. Motorola said in a 2010 lawsuit that Huawei had successfully turned few of its Chinese-born employees into informants. And in 2012 the U.S. House Intelligence Committee labelled Huawei a national security threat and urged the government and American businesses not to get its products. Huawei denied all the claims. The Cisco and Motorola lawsuits ended with settlements. The US Department of Justice is moreover suspecting Huawei of stealing protected trade secrets from T-Mobile – these pertaining to its touchscreen experience testing robot Tappy.