If we go back to the Jan 29 NR announcing the Optical Interposer and the waveguide stack which POET reports is being readied for transfer to manufacturing. That NR provides details of the breakthrough in light confinement along with the ability to run optical signals and electrical signals on parallel circuits.  It is really something that industry has been trying to do for a long time.

Poet's optical interposer provides the ability to run electrical and optical interconnections side by side on the same interposer chip at a micrometre scale.

Clearly that ability has been recognized and has led to the agreements that have been signed since that announcement. I do expect there is more to come as this technology does provide something that industry is looking for with a bottom line of cheaper to produce, scalable and compact footprint along with the goal of reducing energy requirements in the data center.

This work could have really been done just about anywhere but I expect that Shash was right about the UK or DL.  The critical piece of equipment is a low temperature deposition system which is probably a PECVD (Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition).  They are not cheap. A used one from Applied Materials is $225k.

Also within that NR:

Consistent with prior expectations, the company continues to work toward providing engineering samples of a receive optical engine to customers by the middle of 2018. This device will be fabricated leveraging Poet's optical interposer platform.

The question some of us have is are those engineering samples being generated from the UK or DL or was that statement made based on the expectation that they would be up and running at SilTerra?