PHORMIC establishes a European platform for next-generation programmable photonic chips with a low adoption threshold for product developers in diverse application domains. The PHORMIC platform consists of three tiers. The first tier is a 200 mm wafer-scale fabrication flow that augments an established world-class silicon photonics platform with transfer-printed III-V optical amplifiers and compact low-power MEMS actuators. The devices are encapsulated in wafer-scale hermetically sealed cavities that will also be used for on-chip gas cells to calibrate the tunable lasers built in PHORMIC. The combination of high-speed silicon photonics, broadband optical gain and low-power MEMS tuners is a true enabler for new applications. The process flow will be supported by a design kit for building complex photonic circuits. The second tier supplements the photonic chips with modular packaging processes and driver electronics (including highspeed drivers), and the packaging and connectivity logic are integrated in the design kit. This provides a low-threshold entry point for building complex photonic chip-based systems with active control and programmability. The third tier builds on this to create a multipurpose programmable photonic processor, which can control the flow of light in an analogue way through a software interface. This chip, together with its electronics and programming framework, forms a true “photonics development kit”. This enables an off-the-shelf use model like that of electronic FPGAs, reducing prototyping time for new concepts from >1 year to weeks. The PHORMIC consortium has all expertise to establish a full supply chain, including a migration path to a European industrial 200 mm foundry. The application potential of the three tiers of the platform is validated through three demonstrators, in datacenter communication, sensing and mm-wave wireless beamforming. For each case, a customdesigned chip will be compared to the multipurpose photonic processor.