Month: December 2023

Enlarge / In the past you needed to be brave to own an Italian motorcycle. Now you just need to be brave to ride one. (credit: Ducati)

BOLOGNA, ITALY—For decades, owning an Italian motorcycle required a tradeoff. On one hand, Italian bikemakers led the pack with gorgeous designs and the most exotic, highest-performing engines in the world. No other country could come close to matching the sounds and smells of a Ducati, Moto Guzzi, or Aprilia revving by. But build quality and reliability always presented a challenge for owners, not to mention parts availability and exorbitant maintenance costs.

Ducati arguably led the charge in every regard, setting a standard as the Ferrari of the motorcycle world with eye-catching Rosso Corsa red paint jobs to go along with real racing success in MotoGP and World Superbike thanks to famous—some might say infamous—desmodromic engines. However, In recent years under Volkswagen Group's ownership, Ducati has made great strides in reliability and build quality, which explains to a large extent why 2022 was the firm's most profitable year ever, with 62,000 bikes sold worldwide.

During a recent trip to Italy, I visited the Ducati factory in Bologna to learn how modernizing the production facility at Borgo Panigale helped improve the bikes built there over the decade since joining the Volkswagen group.

Enlarge (credit: zf L via Getty)

The world’s leading semiconductor companies are racing to make so-called “2 nanometer” processor chips that will power the next generation of smartphones, data centers and artificial intelligence.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company remains the analysts’ favorite to maintain its global supremacy in the sector, but Samsung Electronics and Intel have identified the industry’s next leap forward as a chance to close the gap.

For decades, chipmakers have sought to make ever more compact products. The smaller the transistors on a chip, the lower the energy consumption and the higher their speed. Today, terms such as “2 nanometer” and “3 nanometer” are widely used as shorthand for each new generation of chip, rather than a semiconductor’s actual physical dimensions.