Optical link developments for the CMS RPC

The rather general data link component testing and evaluation work done at the Helsinki Institute of Physics has become more and more focused on providing a working solution for the CMS RPC fibre optic trigger and data links. A new test board, LINX, has been designed to fill the specific needs of RPC links prototyping, including implementation of a data compression scheme. In this paper the LINX board is described in some detail, and a link solution based on commercial components available at the moment is proposed. Gamma and proton irradiation test results for some of these components are also presented.