We present our work on reconfigurable, general-purpose linear photonic circuits. Photonic integrated circuits today resemble the very specialized application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) rather than general-purpose CPUs or highly flexible field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Reprogrammable optical circuits could dramatically reduce the time to application or prototype a new optical chip. We will discuss the possibilities of such circuits, and present a working implementation of a 4 ×

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... -port universal linear circuit implemented in silicon photonics. We demonstrate the circuit performing two distinct linear operations by changing the software algorithms that controls the circuit.