NEC Corp duly announced the consolation prize for its Roseville, California memory chip plant after Livingston in Scotland won the major prize of some $800m new investment last month. NEC is to invest about $50m to upgrade the existing lines at Roseville to enable them to fabricate 64M-bit memory chips by the middle of next year.Roseville will come on line with 64Ms sooner than Livingston, because the latter will be a new plant built from scratch. Roseville is currently making 4Ms and 16Ms and is expanding the latter. The new investment will take the total sunk into at Roseville to over $1,100m. Overall, NEC is increasing its planned capital investment for semiconductors for the year to next March to $1,250m from the earlier $1,100m.
