Respected professor accused of relabelling Motorola chips as his own invention

The revelation that a groundbreaking mobile phone chip is a fake has shocked China, where the home-grown 'invention' had become a source of considerable national pride.

Shanghai's prestigious Jiaotong University announced at the weekend that the Hanxin DSP (digital signal processing) chip had been faked by inventor Professor Chen Jin, who was also the dean of the university's School of Microelectronics.

Rumours of foul play have been swirling around the project for several months, and appear to have provided the impetus for the investigation of Professor Chen.

One anonymous online forum post that began circulating in China in January claimed that Professor Chen had created the original Hanxin chips simply by grinding away the top surface of some of Motorola's Freescale DSP chips with sandpaper and having them reprinted with the Hanxin logo.

The university did not confirm this version of events, but investigators told local media that the chip had used "foreign" technology.

They also said that, contrary to claims by the design team, Hanxin's performance in tasks like media encoding and fingerprint image matching had failed to meet targets.
Professor Chen, a 38 year-old who earned his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, has been lauded by the media and feted by China's political leaders during the past three years.

However, he has now been fired from his post and will have to repay millions of dollars in government funds invested in the project, reports say.

Angry comments on Chinese forums and blogs have called for everything from criminal charges to execution for the disgraced academic.

Projects like the Hanxin chip have become entangled with issues of national pride in China.

The country is heavily dependent on expensive foreign technology for its huge, and growing, electronics manufacturing industry. The word 'Hanxin' can be translated as 'Chinese heart' or 'Chinese core'.

Growing dependence on international trade, and membership of the World Trade Organisation, have forced China to adhere more strongly to rules on intellectual property rights.

In recent years the government has been strongly promoting home-grown technology as a way to reduce payments to foreign patent holders like mobile phone chip maker Qualcomm.

Foreign chip manufacturers provided about 80 per cent of the chips used in Chinese-made products last year, earning some $36bn in revenue in the country.

The first version of the Hanxin was unveiled to much fanfare in February 2003, amid proud boasts from political leaders that Shanghai could soon become one of the world's top chip manufacturing centres.

The Hanxin chips could be used in mobile phones and would help China develop its own digital signal processor chip technology without having to pay for foreign intellectual property rights, Ministry of Science and Technology officials told journalists.

IBM planned to use the chip in future products, Chinese media reports claimed last year. However, a search of IBM's China and international websites returns no hits for Hanxin in English or Chinese.

Professor Chen and the university set up a company, Hisys, to develop and market the DSP chip. The Hisys website is currently offline, as are the university's pages about the invention.

Earlier this year, Chen and his 100-strong team began work on a new, more advanced version of the Hanxin. The now-cancelled Hanxin 5 was to be a system-on-a-chip which would combine a CPU with DSP functions.