Nearly three months after Inphi. Corp. hired a new CEO to recover from a 93 percent drop in profits in 2011, the semiconductor company reported a net loss of $1.5 million for the first quarter.

The Santa Clara-based company, which designs chips aimed at packing more memory onto Internet servers and increasing bandwidth, employs a large engineering force in Thousand Oaks. In a quarterly earnings report released April 24, the company said the first quarter’s loss compares to income of $2.4 million during the first quarter of last year. But by the time 2011 came to a close, net income for the year had plummeted 93 percent from $26.1 million to $1.9 million.

The earnings report said revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $20.2 million, compared with $21.5 million for the same time period last year. Revenue is up 17 percent from the $17.3 million the chip business reported in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Analysts estimated that earnings per share would equal 4 cents per share for the first quarter of this year. Inphi’s net loss came in at 4 cents per share.

Inphi’s new CEO is Ford Tamer, a former venture capitalist who helped turn Khosla Ventures around by helping it invest in several companies. Young K. Sohn, the chip company’s former CEO, retired from the company Feb. 1 and did not seek reelection to its board of directors.

“I am pleased to report sequential revenue growth in my first quarter at Inphi and expect this trend to continue throughout the year,” Tamer said in the report. “After almost three months as the CEO of Inphi, I can say that I continue to be impressed with the strength of Inphi’s customer engagements, the depth of our relationships with ecosystem partners and the high quality of our team. I am enthusiastic about our prospects and where we will take Inphi as a company.”

Inphi’s shares dropped 1.9 percent to $13.69 after the earnings announcement.