Research led by Monash University, RMIT and the University of Adelaide has developed an accurate method of controlling optical circuits on fingernail-sized photonic integrated circuits. The development, published in the prestigious international journal Optica builds on the work by the same team who recently created the world's first self-calibrated photonic chip. Photonics, or the use of light particles to store and transmit information, is a burgeoning field, supporting our need to create faster, better, more efficient and more sustainable technology. Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs), offer diverse signal processing functions within a single chip, and present promising solutions for applications ranging from optical communications to artificial intelligence. Whether it's downloading movies or keeping a satellite on course, photonics is radically changing the way we live, revolutionising the processing capability of large scale equipment onto a chip the size of a human fingernail.