Silvaco Data Systems v. Intel Corp was a trade secrets case heard before the California Court of Appeal for the Sixth District.

Silvaco makes several EDA products including SmartSpice, a tool for designing and simulating analog circuits.

The source code is the recipe from which the pie (executable program) is baked (compiled).The court also observed that accepting Silvaco's arguments would have dire policy consequences: To brand Intel‟s conduct as unethical, we would have to conclude that any end user of a software application must desist from its use—whatever the resulting harm to his own business—the moment anyone claims that the application was compiled from stolen source code.

This would be a prescription for the stultification of technological development and of other business activities taking place at a considerable remove, causally and ethically, from the claimed wrong.

Far from serving the purposes of trade secrets law, such a rule would make it far too easy to suppress competition and technological development by threatening not only would-be competitors, but also their customers, with litigation of virtually unlimited scope.Several commentators observed that the court's decision in this case clarified the application of trade secret law to software.