NovaSparks ticker plant data feed delivered direct to FPGA trading platforms
NovaSparks, the leading field programmable gate array (FPGA) market data company, today introduced NovaLink, the new FPGA-to-FPGA link that allows trading firms to receive NovaSparks’ ticker plant data directly into their own FPGA trading systems.
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The data is consumed through a normalized hardware application program interface (API) provided as an intellectual property (IP) core by NovaSparks. With NovaLink, FPGA teams at trading firms are free to focus on the development of their trading strategies rather than investing time and efforts in feed handler development and maintenance, resulting in reduced time-to-market.
Luc Burgun, CEO of NovaSparks, said: “With NovaLink, banks and trading firms can now implement complex advanced trading strategies that cover thousands of instruments across markets and asset classes with the speed and determinism that only FPGAs can deliver, completely eliminating the CPU and software from the critical processing path. NovaLink reduces FPGA development costs for our customers by exploiting the exceptional market and functional coverage that we added in the last few years.”
By using NovaLink, trading firms off-load the feed handler functions of their overall design onto separate FPGA chips, which gives more space on their own FPGA to implement larger scale trading strategies that will not fit on a single chip system otherwise. In addition, their strategies can now benefit from accessing a fully featured feed handler with resiliency features which are typically only found in software feed handler solutions. This feature set includes support for exchange refresh and/or packet retransmission services, advanced A/B arbitration, and snapshot.
NovaLink interfaces with both Altera’s and Xilinx’s FPGAs and is available in several different options. Average latency with NovaLink is one microsecond for order-based feeds like NASDAQ TotalView ITCH, and 750 nanoseconds (ns) for level-based feeds like Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) MDP3, measured from the wire on the market side to the trading firm’s FPGA. NovaLink complements the existing 10Gig Ethernet Multicast and PCIe DMA distribution options already available on the NovaTick appliance.