A Chinese university professor has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing intellectual property from two American companies several years ago.
Hao Zhang was charged in 2015 along with five other Chinese nationals for economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. Although the five others remain free, likely in China, Zhang made the mistake of re-entering the United States and was quickly arrested.
R&D projects funded by DARPA on bulk acoustic wave thin-film resonator (FBAR) technology — said to have multiple military and defense applications — were investigated, after which they went on to work on FBAR projects at Avago Technologies and Skyworks Solutions.
Subsequently, the two, along with four other conspirators, attracted interest for their work at the state-backed Tianjin University and other organizations.
The university agreed to support their plan, and in 2009 they resigned from their positions in the United States and accepted full-time faculty positions at Tianjin.
They later formed a joint venture with the university under the name ROFS Microsystems to mass-produce FBAR, according to the Department of Justice.
They were accused of stealing "recipes, source code, specifications, presentations, designs," and other confidential documents from Skyworks and Avago in order to build a state-of-the-art production facility and secure commercial and military contracts.
The case will further reinforce U.S. suspicions that Chinese students in the country pose a threat to national security, whether they have been persuaded by Beijing to steal on behalf of the Communist Party or are doing so for their own commercial gain.
Zhang's seven-year prosecution concluded this week with the professor sentenced to a minimum-security prison in California and ordered to pay $477,000 to the companies he robbed.
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