US federal court finds Chinese-American engineer Shih Yi-chi guilty of exporting military-grade semiconductors
- Shih Yi-chi, an electrical engineer and former adjunct professor at UCLA, illegally sent chips to a firm in Chengdu, the US Justice Department charged
A Chinese-American electrical engineer faces up to 219 years in prison after a federal jury found him guilty of illegally shipping semiconductors with military applications to China.
After a six-week trial in southern California, Shih Yi-chi, a 64-year-old part-time Los Angeles resident and former president of a Chinese semiconductor company, was found guilty of making false statements to a government agency, mail and wire fraud and filing false tax returns.
Shih, who had also been an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, was convicted of conspiring to gain unauthorised access to a protected computer and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a federal law barring unauthorised exports, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.
Shih, a naturalised US citizen, was convicted of 18 counts on June 26 after being indicted by a federal grand jury.
His lawyer said Shih never sent semiconductors to China but had designed them himself for a legitimate research project.
Shih faces the forfeiture of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of assets. US District Judge John Kronstadt has not scheduled hearings to consider the forfeiture issue or pronounce sentence.