In a lawsuit filed yesterday, AMD charged that a former vice president and three managers at its Boxborough plant left for jobs at rival NVidia only after copying more than 100,000 confidential documents to take with them to their new jobs.

The suit, filed in US District Court in Worcester against Robert Feldstein and three managers, seeks the return of the files and, naturally, large sums of money, under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a Massachusetts trade-secrets law. AMD says the files cover everything from details of upcoming AMD technology to contracts with large customers.

Feldestein left AMD last July after helping AMD win contracts to have its chips used in a variety of gaming consoles.

A federal judge yesterday issued a temporary restraining order against the four, ordering them to stay away from the storage devices until at least a hearing on Thursday.

In its complaint, AMD alleges:

AMD has uncovered evidence that three of the four defendants - Feldstein, Desai and Kociuk - transferred to external storage devices trade secret files and information in the days priort to leaving AMD to work for NVIDIA. The volume of materials that these three defendants collectively transferred to storage devices, each of which is unaccounted for, as they left to work for AMD's competitor exceeds 100,000 electronic files.

It adds it has evidence that one of the managers "ran several internet searches about how to copy and/or delete large numbers of documents" and then used that knowledge to transfer thousands of documents