Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved. ”Modularity: Standardization with customizationWhile marquee companies have joined with niche firms and start-ups to develop standards, the challenge remains — are the economics there?“Big companies providing production-grade tools for integrated photonics say, ‘Yes, we can make the tools for volume production, we can make them fast enough and precise enough, but is there a market to convince us to build these systems?’ said Sylwester Latkowski, scientific director of the Photonic Integration Technology Center (PITC) and researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, which is developing terminology and definitions for photonics EDA and optical distribution frame (ODF). “It is critically important over the next three to five years that test equipment developers continue to invest in the space because testability is going to be a key part of the industry’s ability to scale