A Superinductor the Size of a Speck — Built Inside an Ordinary Silicon Chip
Quantum computers are famously hard to build, and one reason is embarrassingly practical: some of their parts are simply too big. A superinductor — a circuit element with an enormous inductance, essential for superconducting qubits and quantum sensors — is usually a bulky coil that takes up far too much room on a chip. Now researchers have built one inside an ordinary silicon chip, using the same manufacturing process that makes the chips in phones and laptops.
The work, published in Nature Electronics on 4 November 2026, was carried out by researchers from CIC nanoGUNE's Quantum Hardware group, Quantum Motion, the London Centre for Nanotechnology, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge. The paper, by Thomas H. Swift and colleagues, is called "A nonlinear superinductor in a deep-submicrometre integrated circuit".
A familiar material, used in a new way
The trick is titanium nitride, or TiN — a material already present in the standard 22-nanometre CMOS manufacturing process used by the chipmaker GlobalFoundries. At deep-cryogenic temperatures, below about 10 kelvin, thin films of TiN become superconducting and carry a very high "kinetic inductance". The team used those films to make superinductors with a footprint of just 18 square micrometres — achieving an inductance density four orders of magnitude better than the conventional spiral inductors normally used in silicon chips. In plain terms: the same inductance in a ten-thousandth of the space.
The team then built the superinductor into a radio-frequency single-electron transistor, or rfSET — the most widely used sensor for semiconductor spin qubits, the tiny quantum bits that store information in the spin of a single electron. Because the sensor and the quantum dot it measures now sit on the same chip, the device is far more sensitive: it achieved a signal-to-noise ratio of 4,500 in a 4-nanosecond measurement, an improvement of more than a hundred times over previous systems, with a 10,000-fold reduction in area.
Why shrinking matters
Quantum computers will need thousands or millions of qubits, and each one needs to be read out quickly and accurately. If the sensor for every qubit is bulky, the machine can never scale up. Building the superinductor with a commercial chip process means quantum parts can, in principle, be made on the same production lines as ordinary electronics — a big step towards practical quantum computers. The researchers say the same technology could also help radio astronomy, low-power cryoelectronics and quantum sensing.
The next step, they say, is to combine the resonator with multi-gate transistors to demonstrate fast, high-quality readout of a qubit's spin in well under a microsecond. For now, the message is simple: one of the bulkiest parts of a quantum computer has just been shrunk to a speck — and it was made with the same tools that build everyday chips.
If your child wonders how the computers of the future will work, a first lesson in physics can start with a coil of wire and end with a quantum sensor smaller than a speck of dust. Book your first lesson
Sources:
- Swift, T. H. et al., "A nonlinear superinductor in a deep-submicrometre integrated circuit", Nature Electronics (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01728-8, as reported by CIC nanoGUNE, 4 November 2026: https://phys.org/news/2026-11-superinductor-silicon-circuit.html
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