The present disclosure provides a programmable integrated circuit die for optical testing. The integrated circuit die includes both photonic and electronic elements. In particular, the integrated circuit die may include a memory block, a programmable logic block (for example, a field programmable gate array), an electrical transceiver block, an optical transceiver block, and an optical test interface unit. The programmable logic block may be programmed to have logic functionalities of an embedded microcontroller and of various encoders/decoders. The logic functions may be soft, hard, or mixed.The memory may be used to store test patterns, look-up tables, measured waveforms, error time profiles and statistics. The electrical and optical transceivers may implement PAMn, NRZ, or QAMn modulations and may have programmable parameters, including: voltage levels; optical power; slew rate; magnitude/phase; clock generation and recovery; equalizations; sampling levels; and sampling times. Other embodiments and features are also disclosed.