Company president Pei Ing Lee told Digitimes that http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20151012PD209.html he has Kingston and another Taiwan-based DRAM module firm considering writing cheques to help with the project.

The upgrade has been on the cards for a while. In fact it was supposed to be done this year, but 2015 turned out to be so dire that Nanya was pleased it delayed. When the outfit drew up the plans it was optimistic that 2015 would be a good year, but actual market conditions were worse than expected.

Now the plan is to speed up its transition to a "die-shrink" 30nm node technology.

Nanya has converted 40 per cent of the company's total wafer start capacity to the process, and the proportion will exceed 50 per cent in the fourth quarter.

Lee noted that PC DRAM prices were still pretty rubbish but end-market demand was picking up. Customers are still engaged in inventory adjustments, Lee said. We guess his theory is that by the time the upgrade is done, the market will have sorted itself out.

Nanya it had consolidated revenues of $320 million for the third quarter of 2015, down 7.3 per cent sequentially. During the quarter, Nanya's bit shipments increased 0.9 per cent.