Was Shane Todd murdered over high-tech secrets?

"Huawei has been behind the eight ball on R&D in recent years – it's been hard for them," says a Washington foreign-trade expert who requested anonymity so as not to burn bridges with the company. "They've really never been cutting edge, always following behind. Their equipment is good, no doubt. But it's just not there when it comes to R&D. So they have to depend on foreign partnerships and hope that they can get it right."

Todd's trip to New Jersey

Certainly, Todd was disconcerted by the presence at IME of Chinese businessmen with an eye on his project – men later identified as being with Huawei, Todd's parents say.

In January 2012, immediately after he returned to Singapore from a trip to New Jersey, Todd told his parents he was being quizzed at work not just by his own IME scientific team, but separately and intensely by the Chinese businessmen.

The timing was significant. It was on that trip to New Jersey, Todd's parents say, that he was given access to key recipes for GaN power amplifier wafers while training with Veeco, a Plainview, N.Y., company that was exporting a specialized GaN-wafer-making reactor to IME. That conclusion, they say, was based on files found on Shane's hard drive and a conversation he had with a family member.

IME had already been doing research on how to make GaN power amplifier wafers in ways that could slash production costs. Todd himself is named as an author on a scientific paper published posthumously in a Japanese scientific journal in October that announced IME researchers "for the first time" had made GaN power amplifier wafers atop an eight-inch silicon wafer. (The Pentagon relies on more potent but far costlier GaN technology based on silicon-carbonite wafers.)

But the advances hinted at in the paper were dependent on one vital element – the advanced formula, or recipe, that Todd's parents say he got in New Jersey. Among the files on Todd's backup drive was one PowerPoint presentation titled "Layer structure and summary of Veeco grown HEMT wafer" containing a formula for boosting a GaN chip, according to documents provided to the Monitor.

"What Shane was working on was essentially a far cheaper version of the GaN chip than is now used by the US military," Huettner says.

World of tech transfer

To prevent such technology from falling into the hands of rivals or potential enemies, US export law requires both the specialized reactors and the recipes to have a license granted by the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. The license must describe the project, recipient, and nation.

Exporting the reactor, experts say, was not a red flag. It could be used for harmless civilian projects like producing light-emitting diodes. The recipe was the key, and formulas for making cutting-edge GaN power amplifier wafers that could be used militarily would not be granted a license, federal officials told the Monitor.

Leaking such information could mean a federal prison sentence, and that is precisely what Todd felt he was being pressured to do, his parents say.

"He told us he felt so naive and worried that he might already have made a mistake and revealed more than he should have," Ms. Todd says. "But he was worried because of the pressure he was under at work to give away these secrets. And he said his life was being threatened."

"It made him very uncomfortable," adds Rick Todd, Shane's father and a former US Navy pilot. "He was upset because he was being pumped for information about this technology by people he didn't really know – and they would ask him questions and then speak to each other in Mandarin about his responses."

By late February 2012, Todd told his parents that he was quitting IME and giving 60 days' notice. But he agreed to remain a month longer because he was the only person qualified on the specialized GaN-wafer-making reactors made by Veeco.

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