SiliconBeat

Trident Microsystems can’t catch a break these days. Now its chief financial officer, Jon
Edmunds, is quitting to join Inphi, a privately-held fabless high speed analog components
company in Southern California, according to an SEC filing Wednesday afternoon.

Last week Trident’s stock fell nearly 12 percent after Goldman Sachs downgraded its rating on the stock. The next day the stock made back most of that when investors bid up its shares in hopes that it might be a takeover target in the wake of STMicro’s acquisition of another Silicon Valley chip maker, Genesis Microchip.

That bump was short-lived, however. A second analyst at Roth Capital cut his rating on the stock Tuesday, and its shares fell back to where the were the week before.

In October, Trident’s shares fell the most since their initial public offering in December
1992 after the company forecast earnings for its fiscal 2008 second quarter that were more than 20 percent lower than analysts had expected.

And in August, the company revealed that both the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange had launched formal investigations into its stock option granting practices.
According to its own internal investigation, Trident determined that the dates of 57 percent of option grants awarded from its initial public offering in December 1992 through June 2006, covering about 38 million shares, were incorrect.

Trident expects to name a replacement for Edmunds before his last day with the company on Jan. 11.