14 DAY TRIAL // Sun's executive vice president of processor division David Yen announced its departure from the company after about 20 years spent at the server vendor. The ex-head of Sun's semiconductor unit is alleged to join networking gear manufacturer Juniper Networks.
According to Sun spokespersons, Yen's position will be temporarily filled by veteran Sun engineering manager Mike Splain, who has been recently appointed as chief technologist of Sun's systems group. Yen's departure comes at a time when the server vendor managed to stabilize its position on the market, after a series of financial losses in the server business.
Juniper Networks refused to comment on Yen joining the networking giant. However, company's spokespersons claimed that they would detail more on the subject on April 7, which is allegedly the official date when Yen joins Juniper.
Yen will end his career at Sun on April 4th after almost 20 years of distinguished collaboration with the server manufacturer. However, rumor has it that Yen's stay at Sun was not always as smooth as pictured. For instance, Yen was reported to have threatened the company with its departure only to squeeze some extra money on his paycheck. The company had no option but inflate its wage accordingly, given the fact that Yen was holding all the manufacturing secrets of Sun's bestseller processor, the UltraSPARC chip.
However, at the same time, Yen could be "held responsible" for helping Sun strike a production agreement with Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC, regarding the 65-nanometer process technology.
At the moment, there is no clue about Yen's upcoming position at Juniper Networks. However, the company seems to have firmly stepped on the Ethernet switch market earlier this year, and is currently fighting rival Cisco Networks on the enterprise networking sector. It would be fair thus to assume that Yen could work on networking processors or even on new breeds of networking hardware.