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A ADVERTISEMENT nthony Levandowski took his seat in a

conference room one sunny Friday morning in April and proceeded to read the

same phrase from a sheet of paper for the next five hours.

“On the advice and direction of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer. And I assert the rights

guaranteed to me under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” Levandowski said.

And then he said it again. And again.

Levandowski, who describes himself as a pioneer in the field of self-driving vehicle technology, had never

A Waymo filing leaks lidar tech details in Uber lawsuit

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been deposed before. But his contributions to the driverless car industry, first at Google’s self-driving unit

Waymo and later at Uber, have landed him at the center of a contentious legal battle between the two

companies. During the April meeting with Waymo’s lawyers, Levandowski was confronted with the details

of the technology he created and asked to admit he had stolen it.

Although Levandowski answered no questions except a handful about his time as a UC Berkeley student,

the questions themselves reveal certain intricacies of Waymo’s technology — features that Waymo claims

have inexplicably turned up in Uber’s lidar devices.

The lawyers’ questions for Levandowski also show that Waymo and Uber’s arguments focus on different

components of their respective lidar systems and that, as the preliminary injunction looms, the two

companies are still talking past each other about their technology.

Waymo has accused Levandowski of copying tens of thousands of confidential files about its lidar

technology and using them to jumpstart Uber’s effort to become the first company to commercialize selfdriving vehicles. On May 3, a federal judge will decide whether Waymo’s allegations are convincing

enough to temporarily halt Uber’s work — a move that would devastate Uber’s plan to become profitable.

“This is an exceptional case. It calls for exceptional relief,” Waymo’s attorney Charles Verhoeven wrote in a

filing. “To this day, Levandowski remains heavily involved in Uber’s LiDAR development. Uber should be

enjoined from continuing to use Levandowski in its driverless car program and from continuing to

misappropriate and infringe Waymo’s intellectual property.”

The case pits Uber’s lidar device, codenamed Fuji and currently under development, against Waymo’s

device, the name of which is redacted in court documents and is already deployed on the road. Not only

does the Fuji infringe on its trade secrets, Waymo claims, but Levandowski also developed another

infringing device at Uber, codenamed Spider.

(Levandowski habitually named his inventions after mountains. At 510 Systems, his company that was

later acquired by Google, a lidar system was named Little Bear, presumably after one of Colorado’s more

challenging 14ers. Later versions of Google’s lidar were nicknamed Grizzly Bear 2 and Grizzly Bear 3. It’s

not clear if Uber’s Spider and an early version of Tyto’s lidar named Owl followed this convention, but

mountains near the Canadian border of Washington bear the names of both creatures.)

Attorneys for Waymo say that Uber tried to keep Spider hidden from the court, while Uber argues that it

didn’t mention Spider because it never became fully fledged technology, amounting to little more than

unassembled parts. Waymo learned of Spider’s existence during the deposition of Asheem Linaval, an

engineer Levandowski recruited from Google to join him at Uber, and was allowed to inspect the

uncompleted device last week.

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Although Waymo submitted an 80-page list detailing the roughly 100 stolen trade secrets to the court, its

attorneys quizzed Levandowski on a handful of design details, including its use of fiber laser technology

and its specific positioning of diodes on a printed circuit board.

TechCrunch learned the name of Uber’s “Spider,” Tyto’s “Owl” and details about Waymo’s technology from

a transcript of Levandowski’s mid-April deposition. Although the information is redacted in the transcript

itself, the public filing included an index of all the words in the deposition and the page and line on which

they appear. By cross-referencing the redactions with the index, it is possible to decipher most of the

redacted information (Waymo has since yanked the public filing from the docket). The names of Spider and

Owl were confirmed in an Uber filing late yesterday afternoon.

Secretive circuit boards

The printed circuit boards, or PCBs, are at the heart of Waymo’s lidar systems. Lidar functions as the eyes

of a self-driving car, sending out lasers that bounce off objects in the car’s environment and ping back,

creating a vivid map of the surroundings. The resulting images are beautiful “pin clouds” that depict nearby

cars, obstacles and people.

These basics of lidar technology are publicly known, but information about Waymo’s printed circuit boards,

which make up the transmit and receive blocks that send out and collect the lasers, has not been made

public.

During Levandowski’s deposition, Waymo’s attorneys questioned him extensively about the design of

circuit boards used in lidar systems at both Waymo and Uber, giving less time to concerns about numbers

of lenses and optical cavities. Many questions focused on the positioning and angle of diodes on the circuit

boards, hinting that Waymo’s infringement argument might focus on the minute details of the PCBs rather

than on the number of lenses and optical cavities of Uber’s lidar device — features Uber said make the Fuji

unique.

Other questions in the deposition refer to the positioning and angle of diodes and guide pins on the printed

circuit board, and the way some of the diodes are positioned at the edge of the boards.

“You used the confidential information you learned at Google to derive the diode spacing shown on the

board?” a Waymo attorney asked Levandowski, showing him a diagram of Uber’s circuit board. “Uber

would not have been able to have developed the spacing on the Fuji board shown on Exhibit 25, without

reference to the 14,000 files you downloaded in December 2015; correct?” (The word “spacing” was

redacted in the transcript.)

The “confidential specifications” of every generation of circuit board Waymo has ever created are among

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the 14,000 documents allegedly taken by Levandowski.

In December 2016, a supplier called Gorilla Circuits mistakenly copied Waymo on an email intended for

Uber engineers that contained a drawing of a circuit board used in the Fuji. Although Google already knew

Levandowski had downloaded confidential files, the email from Gorilla was the first indication he might be

using the files at Uber, Google claims. Waymo says that similarities between its circuit board and Uber’s

are what triggered the litigation, and it identified “Gorilla” as one of 15 search terms for Uber to prioritize as

it scans its servers for Waymo documents.

In a brief filed one week after Levandowski’s deposition, Waymo argued that Levandowski’s monotonous

pleading of the Fifth Amendment could be used to infer that he had indeed stolen the trade secrets he was

confronted with during the deposition. After all, if he hadn’t stolen them, why wouldn’t he speak up and

correct the record?

Because Waymo’s brief names the alleged trade secrets it confronted Levandowski with along with

citations noting when each secret was presented to him, it is possible to piece together the names of the

secrets with the underlying technology discussed in the deposition. Waymo describes the positioning guide

pins on a printed circuit board as Trade Secret 14. (In a reply brief filed earlier this month, Uber huffily

dismissed Waymo’s claims about the secrecy of its guide pins, saying the concept is “as simple and as

general as a Tinker Toy.”) The number of printed circuit boards and the number of diodes on each board

are categorized as Trade Secrets 2 and 3. Trade Secret 7 appears to reference the hanging of specific

diodes. Trade Secrets 1 and 4 reference the spacing and angle of diodes.

Uber contends that Levandowski had no input in the spacing or angles of diodes on the PCB at Otto. In

fact, Uber wrote in its filing yesterday that it initially considered Otto as a possible lidar vendor and

provided its preferred diode spacing and angles to Otto in order to commission PCBs.

“Mr. Levandowski did not provide the beam spacing or angles for Spider, but instead asked Mr. Boehmke

[an engineer hired by Uber from Carnegie Mellon], as the customer, to provide Uber’s desired beam

parameters, which were ultimately used as starting requirements for Spider,” Uber’s attorneys wrote.

After Uber announced its acquisition of Otto in August, the company claims Levandowski had no input into

“the number of boards in the transmit block, configuration of the boards in the transmit block, number of

laser diodes on each transmit PCB, number of optical cavities, number of channels, beam parameters,

positioning of the laser diodes with respect to the edge of the PCB or on bond pads, the use of guide

holes, the location and orientation of the laser diodes on the transmit PCBs, the manufacturing or

alignment of FAC lenses, or methods of spacing.”

Basically, Uber claims the similarities between its circuit

boards and Waymo’s have nothing to do with Levandowski,

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Uber must turn over to Waymo

information about its acquisition of Otto,

saying they were developed by other engineers without his

input.

Fiber saves money

Another feature that Waymo claims as part of its secret

sauce is its use of fiber laser technology, which is referred

to as Trade Secret 48. Waymo says that Levandowski

downloaded a “specific presentation” describing the

technology before abruptly quitting his job at Google.

In a deposition with Sameer Kshirsagar, another former

Googler hired by Uber to work on its driverless cars,

Waymo attorneys raised questions about Uber’s use of fiber

laser technology. Levandowski insisted on particular levels

of ion doping for optical fiber used in lasers, Kshirsagar

said.

However, Uber has accused Waymo of over-claiming

secrets, noting that some of the technologies it has claimed

as secret in-house developments are actually common

knowledge in the lidar industry — and the use of fiber laser

technology in lidar is already well-known.

In a paper published last year by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office, engineers noted that the

adoption of fiber lasers in lidar had the potential to revolutionize the industry.

“An especially important consequence of laser technology development over the past decade is that fiberlaser average power capability now rivals that of traditional bulk solid-state systems, which is a distinct

advantage,” the NASA team wrote. The new fiber systems are compact, an important advantage for

driverless cars — older lidar systems are big, bulky and too expensive for the consumer market. Fiber

systems also have the advantage of being “immune to misalignment.”

Cutting the size and cost of lidar systems is crucial for the

development of self-driving cars. A lidar system from Velodyne, a

leading manufacturer, can cost $75,000 — an unrealistic price

tag for a consumer who’s already spending thousands of dollars

on a car. That’s why Waymo has focused on reducing the size

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court rules

Uber seeks information from Larry Page in

Waymo court case

Waymo accuses Uber of hiding a secret

LiDAR device

Uber denies Waymo theft claims on

grounds it never used custom LiDAR

Uber finds one allegedly stolen Waymo

file – on an employee's personal device

Google claims Levandowski launched

competing projects long before Otto

and price of its lidar system, reportedly cutting costs by as much

as 90 percent.

One shrinking measure that’s been a focal point of the case so

far is Waymo’s reduction to a single lens for transmitting and

receiving the laser beams. In contrast, Uber maintains that its

Fuji is a multi-lens system. It’s not yet clear whether Waymo’s

innovations on circuit boards and fiber laser technology helped it

achieve its cost-cutting objectives — but it is clear that Waymo is

willing to spend millions defending them.

Injunction

In one week, U.S. District Judge William Alsup will decide whether or not to pump the brakes on Uber’s

self-driving program and Levandowski’s career. Lawyers for Waymo have spent the past month trying to

convince Alsup that Uber’s technology is a ripoff of its own, while Uber’s legal team argues that its

technology is unique, developed without significant input from Levandowski or his trove of documents, and

that its work should be allowed to continue.

So far, Uber seems to be losing the fight. During an April 5 hearing, Alsup noted that in 42 years he’d

never seen a record as convincing as the one Waymo’s presented.

Additional reporting by Darrell Etherington.

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