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David Yen is leaving Sun Microsystems after just one year in his
latest post as head of the company's revived semiconductor unit. A Sun
spokesperson said Yen is taking a position at router maker Juniper
Networks, although Juniper could not confirm the news.
Taking Yen's place at least temporarily is Mike Splain, a
veteran Sun engineering manager who was recently named a chief
technologist of Sun's systems group. Splain, who helped design Sun's
microprocessor strategy and oversee its implementation, was named
acting head of Sun's Microelectronics group.
David Yen is leaving Sun Microsystems after just one year in his
latest post as head of the company's revived semiconductor unit. A Sun
spokesperson said Yen is taking a position at router maker Juniper
Networks, although Juniper could not confirm the news.
Taking Yen's place at least temporarily is Mike Splain, a
veteran Sun engineering manager who was recently named a chief
technologist of Sun's systems group. Splain, who helped design Sun's
microprocessor strategy and oversee its implementation, was named
acting head of Sun's Microelectronics group.
The move comes at a time when Sun has just emerged from a protracted period of losses and is beginning to show consistent revenue growth.
Yen had served Sun for 20 years in a variety of capacities often
seen as the executive charged with the company's toughest technical
challenges. He led the company's original microelectronics group at a
time when Sun aggressively tied to recruit other companies to use its
Sparc processor. Later he led the company's server division and then
helped start a new storage division before returning to recreate the
semiconductor group.
To date Sun has had few high profile achievements in its efforts to create a merchant business around its processors.
Sun licensed multithreaded Ethernet technology to Marvel. In a
recent interview, one group executive said Sun is delivering the tools
and services needed to establish a broader merchant market presence for
its chips.
The company recently chose to delay its latest high-profile processor, Rock,
an aggressive design using a number of new techniques. At recent
events, Sun executives played down the Rock delay, saying its
multithreaded Niagara chips were gaining greater than expected market
traction.
Yen recently helped strike a deal
to use TSMC as its primary foundry for work using 65 nm and beyond
process technology. Sun had a longstanding partnership with Texas
Instruments, but TI has ceased development of process technology beyond
65 nm.
It's not clear what role Sun will play at Juniper when he officially joins in April.
Separately, Sun announced Monday it won a $44.29 million grant
from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to develop
its Proximity interconnect technology
as part of a broader project on optical on-chip links. Proximity uses
capacitive coupling to make on-chip connections at extremely high
rates, however, getting proper alignment of the connections has been an
issue for Sun's researchers to date.
Proximity was part of a broad effort to compete for as much as
$300 million in government funding as part of Darpa's High Productivity
Computer Systems project. However, Cray and IBM beat out Sun for that
grant.
Read the original article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206905494
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