Sun Rebuilds Microelectronics Division, Renews SPARC Interest

Dispelling any notions from analysts that by open-sourcing the design of its SPARC processors, it's continuing its slow exit from the chip production business, Sun Microsystems has set out marching in precisely the opposite direction as analysts expected. Yesterday, the company announced it is reforming the "Microelectronics Group" division that during the 1990s was the standard-bearer for RISC processing.

To that end, Sun is moving executive vice president Dr. David Yen, one of UltraSPARC's key architects, into the new division's leadership post, which has yet to be given an official title. Yen had been the head of the Scalable Systems Group, which was the department that acquired the resources of Sun Microelectronics - a.k.a., SPARC Technology Business - a few years ago.

In April of last year, Sun laid off 200 workers in Yen's group, leading to speculation that it was essentially becoming the "Java hardware" division of the company. In a statement at that time, Sun said, "While the decision to restructure or re-balance Sun's workforce is never an easy one, the company operates in a very competitive and constantly changing industry. This requires us to periodically assess our workforce requirements against the needs of the company and our clients. Sun continues to evaluate critical business needs and to look for opportunities to realign skills and resources to meet those needs."

But later that year, then-COO Jonathan Schwartz was picked to assume the CEO mantle from Scott McNealy. The move to Schwartz symbolized to some an end to the company's periodic excursions from its bedrock principles. So "Sun Microelectronics" (SME) is back, in one form or another, which Schwartz sounding the clarion call, and with Dr. Yen back in the driver's seat.

"As with our software, decoupling our silicon from a strict reliance on Sun's systems raises our profile and opportunity globally," Schwartz stated yesterday - a tacit admission on his part that the whole rollback and "periodic realignment" procedure for SME may have been a mistake.

In a memo to his employees posted to his personal Web site yesterday, Schwartz said the objective for his new division would be to “focus on building Sun's Microelectronics business - embedded within, and beyond, Sun's systems.

“Why now? Because we have innovations...that companies beyond Sun are interested in embedding in their devices,” Schwartz continued. “And I want to have a focused, independent team driving those opportunities and monetizing Sun's innovation - from networking and cryptography, to the future of power management and high performance computing.”

In recent years, Sun’s competitors – including Intel – have been speculating about whether SPARC architecture’s use of multiple threads, as opposed to multiple cores, could lead to breakthrough computing speeds. We may have to wait only months rather than years to learn the answer.