Mezzanine cards for the EMU CSC system upgrade at the CMS

In this paper we discuss two ideas related to the design and application of mezzanine cards in the Endcap Muon (EMU) Cathode Strip Chamber (CSC) electronic system at the CMS experiment at CERN. The first is a proposal to upgrade the FPGA-based mezzanines using the most advanced Xilinx Virtex-5 family of FPGA. The second is related to design of a simple and compact mezzanine card with a commercial serializer/deserializer (SERDES) device and industry standard pluggable optical or copper transceiver module. Such a card could be a basic element of the general purpose gigabit data transmission link.