  We propose a conceptual distinction between hard and soft realizations of
deconfinement from nuclear to quark matter. In the high density region of Hard
Deconfinement the repulsive hard cores of baryons overlap each other and bulk
thermodynamics is dominated by the core properties that can be experimentally
accessed in high-energy scattering experiments. We find that the equation of
state estimated from a single baryon core is fairly consistent with those
empirically known from neutron star phenomenology. We next discuss a novel
concept of Soft Deconfinement, characterized by quantum percolation of quark
wave-functions, at densities lower than the threshold for Hard Deconfinement.
We make a brief review of quantum percolation in the context of nuclear and
quark matter and illustrate a possible scenario of quark deconfinement at high
baryon densities.
