Studies of Future Readout Links for the CMS Experiment

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment has developed an electrical implementation of the S-LINK64 extension (Simple Link Interface 64 bit) operating at 400 MB/s in order to read out the detector. This paper studies a possible replacement of the existing S-LINK64 implementation by an optical link, based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet in order to fulfil larger throughput, replace aging hardware and simplify an architecture. A prototype transmitter unit has been developed based on the FPGA Altera PCI Express Development Kit with a custom firmware. A standard PC has been acted as receiving unit. The data transfer has been implemented on a stack of protocols: RDP over IP over Ethernet. This allows receiving the data by standard hardware components like PCs or network switches and NICs. The first test proved that basic exchange of the packets between transmitter and receiving unit works. The paper summarizes the status of these studies.