Evaluation of Multi-Gbps Optical Transceivers for Use in Future HEP Experiments

Future experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will increase the demand for highbandwidth optical links. Custom developments for deployment within the detector volumes might be based on commercially available optical transceivers (TRxs). We present our evaluation of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) multi-Gbps optical TRxs. This serves as the basis to evaluate the performance of the future Versatile Transceiver (VTRx) that is being developed at CERN in the context of the Versatile Link project. We describe the devices evaluated, the experimental set-up for parametric testing, and our analysis of the performance data.