SVR's 28-page complaint, filed Friday (Aug. 10) in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, asserts that Avanti leveraged the economic advantage it gained from theft of trade secrets and source code from Cadence Design Systems Inc. to improve its position in the EDA marketplace and leapfrog past SVR, which at the time held the second-place position behind Cadence in the place and route tool market.

The suit comes roughly one month after Avanti and some of its current and former officials were found guilty of stealing place and route code from Cadence and were ordered to pay Cadence $195 million in restitution. Cadence is also pursuing civil damages against Avanti.

Specifically, the SVR complaint is filed against Avanti and its chairman, Gerald Hsu, consultant Mitch Igusa, and Avanti co-founders Eric Cheng and Stephen Wuu, all of whom pleaded no contest to charges of code theft from Cadence.

"Unfortunately, when a crime is committed, there can be many victims who are hurt by the wrong," said James Benouis, SVR's president and chief executive officer, in a prepared statement. "In this situation, the entity against which the crime was directly committed, Cadence, is not the only party to be damaged. SVR has suffered in the marketplace as a direct result of Avant!'s misconduct, and SVR is now taking action to redress this wrong."

Benouis said SVR, which is arguably the oldest EDA vendor, as it was established in 1979, has been struggling as a result of Avanti's actions in the early '90s. SVR is a publicly held company but was delisted years ago because of its low stock price.

Benouis said that as president and chief executive of SVR, it is his duty to SVR's shareholders to pursue the case against Avanti. He declined to reveal how much money SVR is seeking in its civil suit.

"As the Cadence civil suit states and as our complaint states, does the damage Avanti caused to Cadence and to us ever really end?," said Benouis. "Does [Avanti's] benefit from the theft ever end?"

Avanti officials had not read the complaint and declined to comment late Friday.

A copy of the complaint can be found on SVR's Web site.