Upgrade of the cathode strip chamber level 1 trigger optical links at CMS

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the CMS experiment's Level 1 Trigger system for the endcap Cathode Strip Chambers (CSC) has 180 optical links to transmit Level 1 trigger primitives from 60 peripheral crates to the CSC Track Finder (CSCTF) which reconstructs muon candidates. Currently there is a limit of 3 trigger primitives per crate serving a cluster of 9 chambers. With the anticipated LHC luminosity increase up to 10³⁵ cm⁻²s⁻¹ at full energy of 7 TeV/beam the Muon Port Card (MPC), which transmits the primitives, the receiver in the CSCTF (Sector Processor) and the optical transmission system itself need to be upgraded. At the same time it is very desirable to preserve all the old optical links intact for compatibility with the present Track Finder during transition period. We present here the results of our efforts in the past two years to upgrade the MPC board, including the hardware developments, data transmission tests and latency measurements.