Output power vs. input power for different demonstrated OPO devices, including both integrated (green) and non-integrated (purple) technologies and both (3) (stars) and (2) nonlinearities. In general, integrated technologies (lower left) that have realized high conversion efficiency do so at low output powers, due to factors such as a large frequency mismatch (worsened by Kerr and thermal shifts depending on power, as described in the text) or inadequate suppression of competing processes at higher powers. On the other hand, large table-top technologies (upper right) have simultaneously realized high output powers and high conversion efficiencies, with the caveats of not being widely scalable, in part due to the requirement of pump powers beyond those easily available from compact lasers. Between the low and high power extremes lies an important regime (center, green shade) for deployable laser technology, where input powers are available on-chip and output powers are sufficient for many downstream applications. Our work demonstrates the capacity for (3) silicon-photonics-based OPO to access the highlighted region of performance space, and is (to the best of our knowledge) the only integrated device in the region with wide wavelength separation between the pump, signal, and idler waves. The size of the data points (hexagons and stars) is inversely proportional to the device footprint, with the upper left circles providing a coarse scale bar.
