The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell-on-earth yarn claiming TSMC has reportedly started early pilot work on its 1.4nm A14 process in Taiwan as the chipmaker prepares for volume production in 2028.
According to United Daily News, work is taking place at facilities in Hsinchu Science Park and the Central Taiwan Science Park, where TSMC is building capacity for its next-generation process.
The reports put TSMC further along than its official roadmap suggests. The company still publicly says A14 risk or pre-production will start during 2027 before volume manufacturing begins in 2028.
TSMC has confirmed that development is progressing well. During its second-quarter earnings call, the foundry said an internal product-like test vehicle had reached close to 90 per cent device performance and nearly 90 per cent yield on 256Mb SRAM.
The outfit said interest from smartphone, high-performance computing and AI customers is strong, with new customer tape-out activity running ahead of schedule.
A14 represents TSMC’s second generation of nanosheet transistor technology and follows its N2 family. Despite the convenient numbers, process-node names stopped being literal transistor measurements quite some time ago.
Compared with N2, TSMC claims A14 will deliver 10 to 15 per cent more performance at the same power, or cut power consumption by 25 to 30 per cent at the same speed.
Chip density should improve by nearly 20 per cent, according to TSMC’s latest earnings disclosure. The foundry’s A14 product material delivers logic-density gains of more than 20 per cent.
A14 will use an enhanced version of TSMC’s NanoFlex standard-cell architecture called NanoFlex Pro. It is intended to give chip designers more flexibility when trading performance, power consumption and density against each other.
Before A14 reaches customers, TSMC has A16 to deal with. That process combines nanosheet transistors with the company’s Super Power Rail backside power-delivery technology and is aimed particularly at high-performance computing.
TSMC has already started building its 1.4nm manufacturing infrastructure in Taichung. The company says construction of the new fab began during 2025 as part of its continued expansion of advanced manufacturing capacity in Taiwan.
The company has already unveiled A13, a direct descendant that uses a 97 per cent optical shrink to reduce die area by more than six per cent while retaining backwards-compatible design rules.
That compatibility should allow customers to migrate A14 intellectual property to A13 without throwing their existing work in the bin. A13 is scheduled for volume production in 2029.
TSMC has A12 pencilled in for the same year. It will bring Super Power Rail backside power delivery to the A14 platform, giving the foundry another option aimed squarely at increasingly power-hungry AI and HPC silicon.
The Taiwanese pilot-production report therefore looks plausible given TSMC’s disclosed yield progress, but the foundry has not moved its official timetable. For now, 2027 remains the company’s date for pre-production and 2028 for serious volume.
