Located between the on-detector front-end electronics and the global data acquisition system (DAQ), the off-detector electronics of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) is involved in both detector readout and trigger system. Working at 40 MHz, the trigger part must, within ten clock cycles, receive and deserialize the data of the front-end electronics, encode the trigger primitives using a nonlinear scale, assure time alignment between channels using a histogramming technique and send the trigger primitives to the regional trigger. In addition, it must classify trigger towers in three classes of interest and send this classification to the readout part. The readout part must select the zero suppression level to be applied depending on the regions of interest determined from the trigger tower classification, deserialize front-end data coming from high-speed (800 Mb/s) serial links, check their integrity, apply zero suppression, build the event and send it to the DAQ, monitor the buffer occupancy and send back pressure to the trigger system when required, provide data spying and monitoring facilities for the local DAQ. The system, and especially the data link speed, the latency constraints and the bit-error rate requirements have been validated on prototypes. Part of the system is about to go to production.