High Frequency Trading Acceleration Using FPGAs

This paper presents the design of an application specific hardware for accelerating High Frequency Trading applications. It is optimized to achieve the lowest possible latency for interpreting market data feeds and hence enable minimal round-trip times for executing electronic stock trades. The implementation described in this work enables hardware decoding of Ethernet, IP and UDP as well as of the FAST protocol which is a common protocol to transmit market feeds. For this purpose, we developed a microcode engine with a corresponding instruction set as well as a compiler which enables the flexibility to support a wide range of applied trading protocols. The complete system has been implemented in RTL code and evaluated on an FPGA. Our approach shows a 4x latency reduction in comparison to the conventional Software based approach.