The optical links used in the NA48 experiment were designed by Robert McLaren, Leslie McCulloch and Phillipe Brodier-Yourstone of the ECP division at CERN.
The task of an optical link is to deliver data from the ReadOut Controller (ROC ) of a sub-detector to an Input Buffer (IB ) which is part of the Data Merger. In general, each sub-detector has one Optical Link (excepting the LKr calorimeter which requires 8). The links deliver data at 10 Mbytes/sec over a distance of around 200 m and provide electrical isolation. Although connected to many different sub-detectors, all links are the same; the input to the optical link is defined as the point at which the experiment's data is presented in a common format.