It was obvious that domestic consumers were not the only ones stunned by this product launch.
The footage from the event had long since spread through Huawei's official website and livestream channels on partner media platforms to every connected corner of the world.
As people marveled that carbon-based chips were real and that Professor Lu had not been joking with them, they could not help but recall the paper IEEE had retracted some time ago.
Clearly, the data in that paper had not been exaggerated in the slightest. If anything, it had been rather conservative.
For a time, IEEE's position became instantly awkward.
Retracting a correct paper from a top conference and smearing it as academic fraud not only violated the principles of academic freedom, but was itself a display of academic fraud.
If this had been a decision unanimously approved by IEEE's upper management, then the aftermath of this retraction controversy would deal a severe blow to IEEE's reputation in electronics... and even in fields such as computing, electrical engineering, and all the other areas it covered.
At Yanshan University, Tsinghua University, and many other universities across Hua Nation, more than a dozen professors and scholars had already announced their withdrawal from IEEE and strongly condemned this behavior, which severely violated the spirit of academic freedom.
At the same time, the Hua Academy of Sciences' Center for Documentation and Information swiftly responded by downgrading IEEE journals by one tier for reasons including "academic corruption" and "substandard conduct."
Although IEEE immediately launched a public relations campaign to clarify the matter, trotting out a string of excuses that were not only illogical but almost laughable, such as "the retraction was a ruling made by the organizing committee of the International Conference on Integrated Circuit Design and Technology in accordance with United