Also, there was a rumor that Google was looking at buying an unknown company(possibly Poet) for upto 5 Billion.

They also had completed milestone 5, which was the the switching laser.

POET Technologies Achieves New Milestone and Reports Significant Progress

March 4th, 2014

Toronto, ON, and Storrs, CT, March 4, 2014 – POET Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: PTK, OTCQX: POETF) (“the Company”) – announced today the achievement of continuous-wave (cw) operation of its thyristor laser within its proprietary planar optoelectronic technology (POET) platform for monolithic fabrication of integrated electronic and optical devices on a single semiconductor wafer. The Company is also reporting significant progress on several other initiatives on its technical roadmap.

POET Switching Laser
The Company has achieved the long-awaited milestone (MS-5) – the operation of its switching laser within the POET platform. This achievement has far-reaching implications for on-chip and optical communications applications. This single demonstration is a giant leap forward for an integrated circuit industry looking for ways to push complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes past some challenging technical barriers.

Peter Copetti, Executive Chairman and interim CEO, noted “This is the most definitive step yet in our drive to enhance POET’s electronic and optical monolithic capability, beyond CMOS and silicon photonics.”

Copetti added, “While timeline variations are always to be expected for a company in development mode, our belief in Geoff Taylor and his team has never wavered. We would like to thank the entire technical team for its hard work and dedication.”

Specifically, excellent switching operation was achieved with a laser threshold of 1-mA, just above a thyristor holding current of 0.5-mA, for a 10-micron diameter laser device, exhibiting a suppression ratio of 50-dB. This enables optical short reach applications found in data-center, server farms and high performance computing, thereby lowering system solution cost when compared to silicon photonics.