A new high-speed optical transceiver for data transmission at the LHC experiments

Abstract

We report on results of radiation tests of a new commercial off-the-shelf fiber-optic link as a candidate for the transmission of data from the detector to the counting room for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The device is manufactured by Molex using CMOS integrated silicon photonics developed by Luxtera. A transceiver contains four RX and four TX channels operating at 10 Gbps each, and is packaged in a QSFP+ module. The approach uses a standard CMOS process and single-mode fibers, providing low power consumption and good scalability and reliability. We present performance measurements, radiation tolerance measurements, and plans for deployment in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.