Programmable photonics
Programmable photonics is a subfield of photonics and optical computing that studies the development of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for computation whose circuits can be altered at runtime to run different programs, rather than manufacturing each PIC for a specific program. Almost all modern electronic integrated circuits are programmable and thus programmable photonics is an important step in making optical computing mainstream; a non-programmable electronic integrated circuit (analogous to a non-programmable PIC) would be e.g.