A dean at one of China’s top universities has been fired after his claims to have invented a new computer chip turned out to be a fraud, the school announced Friday.

The scandal at Shanghai Jiaotong University, the alma mater of former
President Jiang Zemin, is an embarrassment for Chinese leaders, who are trying to promote homegrown technological advances to match the country’s economic progress.

Shanghai Jiaotong found that Chen Jin faked research on the Hanxin digital signal processing chip and that it couldn’t perform functions that he claimed, such as verifying fingerprints, the university said in a statement on its Web site.

Source: AP