The University of Washington (UW) has officially launched a new foundry service program that promises to lower the cost of producing silicon photonic chips in dramatic fashion. The Optoelectronics Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS) project is aiming to emulate the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) effort at the University of Southern California in the 1970s that is credited with ushering in the current era of electronic integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing in silicon.