[en] The ALICE silicon pixel detector (SPD) constitutes the two innermost layers of the ALICE inner tracking system (ALICE Collaboration, 1999) . The SPD is built with 120 detector modules (half-staves) and contains about 10 million pixels in total. The half-staves are connected to the off-detector electronics, housed in a control room 100 m away, via bidirectional optical links. The stream of data from the front-end electronics is processed in 20 VME readout modules, called routers, based on FPGAs. Three 2-channel link-receiver daughter cards, also based on FPGAs, are plugged in each router. Each link-receiver card receives data via the optical link from two half-staves, applies the zero suppression and passes them to the router to be processed and sent to the ALICE-DAQ system through the detector data link (DDL). The SPD control, configuration and data monitoring are performed using the VME interface embedded in the router.