The following might get buried under today's POET news release, but anyway.

The University of Washington (Seattle) and Stanford University (Calif.) have created an on-chip laser that can be electro-modulated for easy optical communications. This can be found in this EE Times article:

Nanolaser Enables On-Chip Photonics

The researchers created their laser with a tungsten photonics cavity sandwiched between layers of selenium. They are having "high hopes" for integrating their laser onto standard silicon chips.

I cared to comment on the article with a hint to the POET technology which already has on-chip lasers plus a lot of additional on-chip stuff. Oh, and I also mentioned that POET Technologies is very close to commercializing, which might be a subtle or not so subtle difference …