Chips not at risk: Freescale boss

The US company whose computer chip was at the center of a large scientific fraud in China has played down the risk of intellectual property theft in the chip business, the Financial Times reported. Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale, one of the world's largest chipmakers, said the company's products were very hard to copy and market because they contain a high degree of customization, unlike software whose constituent parts are much easier to identify. Chen Jin, the dean of the microelectronics school at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, was fired after presenting a Freescale product as his own work in order to retain funding after he had failed to replicate the chip. Mayer said the case had been an example of fraud, rather than intellectual property infringement, and had not affected the company's attitude to China.