Tech Shout!

A senior Chinese university official who held the position of the head of the institution’s microelectronics school has been fired for allegedly forging a complete series of chips in order to obtain state funding, local newswires reported late last week.

According to the Xinhau news service, Shanghai Jiaotong University said it had sacked Chen Jin, until that moment the college’s chair of the college’s school of microelectronics. It also dismissed him of his professorship. The move is followed by a government-initiated inquiry into the development of four generations of the Hanxin DSP chip family.

The search was released in January by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, its Ministry of Education and local government of Shanghai in response to a letter received the previous month claiming Chen had engaged in fraudulent research.

The investigation’s central conclusion: that the Hanxin designs, claimed to be high-end, leading-edge parts, did not work as promised or, for that matter, work very well at all. A design said to sport two cores, for example, contained only one, investigators suspected.

Apart from losing his job and professorship, Chen was ordered to pay back the government funds invested in the Hanxin operation.