We report a simple fabrication process for realizing waveguides on periodically poled lithium niobate which preserves both the nonlinearity and the domain inversion. This so-called soft proton exchange has been used to generate highly efficient optical parametric fluorescence in the 1.48–2.01 μm region using a pump around 830 nm. The measured normalized efficiency is 130% W−1 cm−2 for an effective interaction length of 1.3 cm. This experimental figure is very close to the maximum theoretically predicted value of 140% W−1 cm−2.

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