Article

2006-05-15 China-Japan-Koreas

Fake chip storm rocks Chinas science elite

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Posted by BrerRabbit 2006-05-15 06:24|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I thought this was interesting due to the stories about the Chinese being our main competitor in the coming decades.

Posted by BrerRabbit 2006-05-15 08:35|| 2006-05-15 08:35|| Front Page Top

#2 Bwahahahahahahaha. Gotta love it. A Chinese professor scamming the biggest pirating government in the world by pirating American chips. How the Politburo can summon any outrage is beyond me.

Posted by Zenster 2006-05-15 16:15|| 2006-05-15 16:15|| Front Page Top

#3 They spent $14m on this chip. I may be completely off, but I think it takes more than $14m to design a chip, let alone manufacture samples of it. In China, $14m would cover the salaries of 700 college grads for 1 year, at $20,000 a year. I think the money they threw into it wasn't sufficient to get a working prototype out. If $14m were all it took to design and manufacture a current CPU chip, HP would still be manufacturing its own Itanium chips, as opposed to buying them from Intel. And SGI Graphics wouldn't have gone Chapter 11 recently.

Manufacturing CPU chips is a seriously capital-intensive business. If a mere university could do it - Caltech and MIT would each have prototypes out. The Red Flag Linux project is a much better idea - like every other Linux out there, it's pretty much a fringe OS for geeks, but it will be good practical training for college students.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2006-05-15 18:53|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2006-05-15 18:53|| Front Page Top

#4 Maybe TSMC put up some NRE.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-05-15 18:55|| 2006-05-15 18:55|| Front Page Top

#5 Zenster: A Chinese professor scamming the biggest pirating government in the world by pirating American chips.

They did not pirate American chips. Pirating American chips would have been an impressive non-trivial technical achievement. They bought American chips and scrubbed the names off them.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2006-05-15 18:56|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2006-05-15 18:56|| Front Page Top

#6 They did not pirate American chips.

Point made, but the "rebranding" involved is another favorite strategy of those who specialize in knock-offs and the like.

Manufacturing CPU chips is a seriously capital-intensive business.

Actually the chip set in question was not CPU microprocessor, but instead for a DSP (Digital Signal Processing) application.

Jiaotong University in Shanghai said late on Friday it had fired Chen Jin, dean of the Microelectronics School, for faking research behind a series of chips for digital signals processing.

DSP has an extremely wide range of applications from oscilloscopes, consumer audio and electric guitar effects all the way to object discrimination for radar and other military uses.

I still maintain that it is hilarious to see China so indignant over what is essentially a state-approved practice. Only, this time around, it was their coffers being drained instead of ours. Hypocritical @ssholes.

Posted by Zenster 2006-05-15 20:21|| 2006-05-15 20:21|| Front Page Top

#7 I also meant to add that designing DSP circuitry is considerably less complex than the firepower needed for a high-speed CPU. DSPs rely upon a substantial signal delay line that can be used to parade signal information past an array of arithmetic processors and comparators looking for things like zero-crossing events, peaks, ringing, anomalistic or spurious signatures, signal floor, noise background and the like. More sophisticated DSPs are able to perform FFT (Fast Fourier Transforms) plus other differential and integral calculations needed for signature analysis, like that required in heat-seekers, HARM and other source guided ordnance.

Posted by Zenster 2006-05-15 20:29|| 2006-05-15 20:29|| Front Page Top

#8 So in other words, China's oligarchy thought they were about to make a major leap in weapons production, and now they aren't. I'm surprised the good professor has only been fired from his job. This is the kind of thing for which the family is usually billed for the bullet afterwards.

Posted by trailing wife 2006-05-15 21:42|| 2006-05-15 21:42|| Front Page Top

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