When electrons move in a conductor or semiconductor, due to the material's resistance they are more or less slow and produce heat. This is different in a superconductor: Here the resistance is virtually zero. The electrons are very fast and don't produce heat.

However, you have to cool down the material. Below a certain temperature, the so-called "critical temperatur", the material becomes a superconductor.

The big news is that the MIT has found a mathematical formula to calculate the relation between the critical temperature, the resistivity, and the thickness of a superconducting film. Researchers no longer have to rely on try and error to find a material's superconductivity properties or to find a material resp. a material configuration with the proper superconductivity properties for a certain application. Instead they can calculate that in advance. Read more:

MIT Discovers Superconductor Law

This article also outline possible applications.

I don't know whether POET (or silicon) could benefit from this. I don't even know how semiconductors are behaving below their respective critical temperatures. Anyway, when I read "film", I thought "molecular beam epitaxy", which is an important step in the POET process.

If superconductivity would ever make any sense for POET, this new MIT formula could not only speed up development considerably, but could render such developments possible at all, because without it they would be very time-consuming and expensive. However, with the formula being integrated in the physical models of a PDK, they could quickly try out various configurations without actually building something.