Sun Micro Chip Chief Steps Down

The head of Sun Microsystems'JAVA chip division has stepped down and, having cashed in the last payment of a rich retention agreement, is reportedly jumping ship.

David Yen, the executive vice president that manages Sun's microelectronics division, resigned from his post last Friday, according to a one-sentence regulatory filing issued by Sun on Tuesday.

According to a report in the online tech news site The Register, Yen is heading to Juniper NetworksJNPR for an undisclosed role to be announced on April 7.

Yen is a 20-year Sun veteran, and among its most valued, to judge by the company's payscale. According to Sun's most recent proxy filing, Yen ranked among the top five Sun employees by compensation in 2007 with a salary of $590,000, excluding stock options and stock awards, as well as a $250,000 bonus. The bonus was the final installment of three equal-sized, annual bonuses conferred to Yen in a 2005 retention agreement.

Last March, Sun separated its microelectronics division into its own operating group, handing responsibility for the business to Yen.

In recent years, Sun has moved to offer servers and workstations based on industry-standard x86 microprocessors made by IntelINTC and Advanced Micro DevicesAMD. At the same time, the company has continued to innovate with its own silicon designs, unveiling the new Niagara family of microprocessors.

And on Monday, Sun announced that it had received $44 million in funding from the Department of Defense for a five-year research project on optical connections in semiconductors.

Sun's latest microprocessor has faced some delays, however. In February, Sun pushed back the release of the 16-core Rock processor by a year, citing the need to put the chip through further testing.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company had $3.61 billion in sales with net income of $260 million in its most recently ended quarter.

Shares of Sun were unchanged at $16.38 in extended trading Tuesday.