Mark Papermaster, the former IBM chip guru who was recently hired by Apple Inc, was ordered by a federal judge to stop working, court documents show.

U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Karas ruled that the former IBM executive must "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc. until further order of this court." The judge did not elaborate on his decision and only said that he would issue an opinion in the near future.

IBM took Mark Papermaster and Apple to court after the executive accepted an executive job for the Cupertino-based company despite the fact that he was forbidden to do so by a contract with the Big Blue. The contract stipulated that Papermaster wouldn’t be allowed to work for a competing company in the first year following his leaving of IBM. The contract was motivated by the fact that Papermaster had knowledge of a great amount of information considered strictly confidential by IBM.

IBM filed a motion for a preliminary injunction destined to stop Papermaster's move to Apple Inc. IBM sued Papermaster on 22 October after the chip expert was hired by Steve Jobs to run Apple’s iPod and iPhone engineering group. Apple’s Tony Fadell, the man credited with the huge success Apple iPod had, was moved to another position to make way for Papermaster. Fadell remained in the company as an adviser for Steve Jobs.

Papermaster insists that his current job at Apple is very different from what he used to do at IBM and that there shouldn’t be a problem for him to continue working there.