SHANGHAI -- The firing of a prominent academic official here this month for faking the development of a well-known chip family is an embarrassing setback for the Chinese government, which views high-tech research and development as a key piece of China's economic future.

Chen Jin, who was the dean of Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Microelectronics, was sacked after a government investigation determined that he falsely claimed that he and a team of co-workers developed the Hanxin series of digital signal processors used in mobile phones and other devices.

The initial Hanxin DSP chip was hailed by Chinese officials as a breakthrough for the country's semiconductor industry after it was unveiled in 2003 by a company Chen had set up. Three more versions have been released since then.

The fraud began to unravel in December with the start of a two-month investigation into the Hanxin project. The investigators from China's Ministry of Science and Technology, which helped fund the chip development work, found that none of the chips met the specifications claimed by Chen.

For example, they discovered that the dual-core Hanxin 4 is based on a processor core from ARM Ltd. in Cambridge, England, not on one developed by Chen and his team, the Shanghai university said.