Tsinghua University chip expert Sun Nan’s return to China went largely unnoticed in the wave of Chinese scientists returning from abroad – that is, until last week, when the prestigious university in Beijing put a social media spotlight on the professor who has helped create more than 50 cutting-edge chips in a little over four years.
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According to an article published on Tsinghua’s social media account on Thursday, Sun came back after many years in the United States with the hope of “training chip professionals for China and solving the manufacturing problems of mid- and high-end chip technology”.
Sun, a tenured professor at the university’s department of electronic engineering, returned to his homeland in 2020 after more than a decade in the US. His homecoming came at the height of the China Initiative, a US policy that targeted scientists for suspected ties to Beijing and left researchers feeling “targeted and alienated”.
High-end semiconductors – the components that drive key innovation sectors from artificial intelligence to quantum computing – are a critical area of US tech containment that China is striving to break.
Since joining Tsinghua more than four years ago, Sun and his team have worked on both scientific research and industrial applications, with the aim of producing more reliable and efficient chips at a lower cost. They have taken on a number of major national research projects.
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The high-performance circuit design technologies they have developed have been integrated into more than 50 chips, according to the Tsinghua article. These chips have been used for the power grid, high-speed rail, industrial measurement and control, instrumentation, electric vehicles and other fields.
“[These chips] achieved import substitution for similar foreign products and even surpassed foreign counterparts in some core technical indexes to reach the international leading level,” the article said.