The present invention relates to a programmable multicore photonic integrated circuit comprising at least one programmable photonic modules or cores, and/or other photonic units like specific high performance blocks, capable of implementing multipurpose signal processing, by the appropriate programming of its resources, routing within the circuits and the blocks to achieve multifunctional operation and the selection of its input and output ports. The invention also relates to a scalable programmable photonic integrated circuits arranged in a modular multicore approach to increase the processing power of the overall system and/or adding a multitude of functionalities enabled by complex photonics circuitry and parallelization as well as the related operation methods.