  Plans to upgrade the LHC after approximately 10 years of operation are
currently being considered at CERN. A tenfold increase in luminosity delivered
to the experiments is envisaged in the so-called Super LHC (SLHC). This will
undoubtedly give rise to significantly larger data volumes from the detectors,
requiring faster data readout. The possibility of upgrading the CMS Tracker
analog readout optical links using a bandwidth efficient digital modulation
scheme for deployment in the SLHC has been extensively explored at CERN.
Previous theoretical and experimental studies determined the achievable data
rate using a system based on Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) to be
~3-4Gbit/s (assuming no error correction is used and for an error rate of
~10-9). In this note we attempt to quantify the feasibility of such an upgrade
in terms of hardware implementation complexity, applicability to the high
energy physics (HEP) environment, technological feasibility and R&D effort
required.
