An apparatus and method is provided for the testing of an optical bus, that method having: loading transmission test data and address information for at least one receiving cell via an electronic bus in a first register; setting a clock rate for the optical bus; employing the optical bus to transmit the test data from the first register to the at least one receiving cell; reading out received test data from the receiving cell via the electronic bus; correlating the received test data from the first register with the transmission test data; analyzing errors in the received data and handling of the received data by the bus.