Chinese academic faked groundbreaking mobile phone chip

The Chinese people have been shocked and embarrassed by the revelation that the Hanxin DSP (digital signal processing) chip, which was destined to revolutionise mobile phones, has been faked. The chip’s creator, Professor Chen Jin of Shanghai's Jiaotong University, who was the dean of the university's School of Microelectronics, has been exposed as a fraud. Jiaotong University have confirmed that the chips were faked.

Rumours began to build up at the beginning of the year that the chips were a fraud; there was talk that Professor Chen had created the Hanxin chips simply by grinding away the top surface of some of Motorola's Freescale DSP chips, and then adding the Hanxin logo. Additionally, the chips failed to live up to expectations in tasks like media encoding and fingerprint image matching.

Professor Chen, 38, now has to repay millions of dollars in government funds. There has been talk of imprisonment and even the death penalty for the disgraced academic, which strikes me as a little extreme.