Today's leading quantum chips mostly connect a qubit to its immediate neighbors and nothing else. A useful large-scale quantum computer needs coordination across millions of qubits spread over an entire chip, not only clusters sitting next to each other. Researchers at the University of Warwick and NRC Canada published a proposed answer to that gap on July 29, 2026, in APL Quantum: a concept they call Quantum Phononic Links.
What a phononic link is
The idea uses phonons, sound-like vibrations traveling through a solid material, to carry quantum information between qubits that sit far apart on the same chip. The material behind it, compressively strained germanium on silicon, was developed at Warwick using advanced epitaxial growth techniques. Engineered correctly, the vibrations carry information whether the qubits involved sit side by side or are separated across a full semiconductor wafer up to 300 millimeters across.
That distance matters. Nearest-neighbor-only connectivity is exactly the constraint that shapes which error-correcting codes a chip even attempts. Our companion piece on Quantinuum's Helios covers why trapped-ion hardware's all-to-all connectivity opens up error-correction codes that a nearest-neighbor superconducting chip cannot use efficiently. A phononic link aimed at chip-scale, non-local connectivity is targeting the same structural limitation from the silicon side.
Read the maturity level accurately
This is a concept and materials result, not an operating multi-qubit device. The paper proposes a mechanism and demonstrates the underlying material properties. It does not yet show a working chip moving quantum information between distant qubits using this method. That puts it in a different category of evidence than HRL's self-operating silicon processor, published the same week, which is a working 18-qubit device with a control chip already running inside its cryostat.
Both results matter, and they matter for different reasons. HRL solved a real engineering problem for a small, existing device. Warwick proposed a mechanism aimed at a target two or three orders of magnitude larger, with the harder work of building and testing an actual chip still ahead of it. Neither is more important than the other. They sit at different points on the path from proposal to product, and coverage that treats them as equally proven misses that distinction.
Why the target size is the real headline
A million qubits is well beyond any current device, superconducting, trapped-ion, or silicon. Getting there needs progress on several fronts at once: qubit quality, error correction overhead, control electronics, and exactly the qubit-to-qubit communication problem this proposal addresses. No single result solves all of it. What is worth tracking is whether Warwick's group, or others building on the same cs-GoS material, demonstrates the mechanism working on an actual multi-qubit chip. That demonstration, not the concept paper, will be the point where this result earns a place next to HRL's on the list of things that shipped. See our hardware overview for how silicon-based approaches compare to the rest of the field.