Bigdan: So is this what Poet is doing? When the writter says "we", who is he referring to?

They have a similar goal. They are seeing the drawbacks of Silicon Photonics, which Stephane Gagnon summarizes in the CIC presentation as follows:

• 12:21 – We can integrate optics and electronics together in one die. When people hear that we can do optics in the same device as electronics, one could think about input and output of the device. A lot of people have tried to do this already, called Silicon Photonics. It’s basically trying to leave the chip or come into the chip with optical fiber. That’s called Silicon Photonics. They can’t really do it today, because silicon cannot lase, it cannot be a laser and emit light. Silicon just can’t do that.
  
  13:03 – But gallium arsenide can. So our structure, our basic structure of the optical thyristor can lase, can be an optical driver and can also be an optical receiver, receive light and bring it into the chip.

But while POET Technologies bases everything on a gallium arsenide substrate, the UCLA folks start off with a silicon substrate and want to layer gallium arsenide on top of that. However, that doesn't work due to physical peculiarities like lattice mismatch etc. So they first put a layer of carbon (graphene) on the silicon, and after that they put gallium arsenide on top of the carbon. This works, at least sort of.

So they have an approach. Okay, fine. But do they have lasers? No! Do they have receivers? No! Do they have optical thyristors or something equivalent? No!

Instead they have problems:

• We have tried to prevent the island growth in the high-temperature epitaxy step by increasing the nucleation layer thickness to 100 nm.
  
  However, this has not been successful, suggesting that the GaAs/graphene interface is not stable at high temperatures – and that’s unfortunate, because high temperatures hold the key to crystalline GaAs, and to the suppression of defects and dislocations through migration.

So they are still at an early research stage. I wish them good luck. Might they take all the time they need to find out whether it is possible to grow a single-crystal GaAs thin film on silicon or not! And when/if they have solved these problems (which might happen or not), they would still have to develop light emitters and light receivers on top of that and find out how to do the opto-electrical integration. That's a very long way to go!

In the meantime, POET Technologies will continue to commercialize its own solution. This solution is proven, it includes light emitters and receivers, it includes optical and electrical integration, it includes much more.

Yes, I think we are really very much ahead of the curve!