High Frequency Trading speak to CEO Jeff Milrod about BittWare's FPGA development for the Low-Latency Financial Market

High performance computing using FPGA technology is a key technology for the financial services industry. High frequency automated financial trading uses models and simulations to provide real-time assistance in decision making. 

BittWare has designed and developed a family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware optimised for this market. BittWare CEO Jeff Milrod has been speaking to High Frequency Traders about how this technology has made the low-latency financial market very excited.....

HFT: BittWare has been in business for quite a while, but you’ve only got into the financial space comparatively recently. How did this come about?

Jeff Milrod: "We’ve been producing commercial off-the-shelf signal processing boards and high performance computing boards since 1989 and they’ve been used in a wide variety of markets over the years.

Military is big component of our business as are wireless telecommunications, high-end instrumentation and medical imaging. More recently, we’ve actually had the finance market come to us. In the last couple of years it has decided that FPGAs are very attractive platforms for reducing the latency and increasing the performance of a lot of their applications. It just so happens that we have some of the best FPGA boards in the world. We were approached by financial market customers who thought our engines could work very well for them, so we’ve been working hard to learn more about the market and to figure out how to modify our boards slightly and add additional IP to create better solutions for the finance space.

One thing that’s unique about what we do, particularly compared to some of our competitors in the finance market, is that we consider ourselves a horizontal enabling technology. It’s expressed in our slogan ‘Essential building blocks…Innovative solutions.’ We want to provide building blocks for our customers and allow them to add the unique vertical application-specific value themselves. We don’t believe that’s our role. There’s a commonality across all markets for the underlying processing engines – be they implemented with signal processors or FPGAs – with relation to high speed data movement, power conditioning and control, thermal management and obsolescence management for deployed world class system solutions."

The full interview can be found here - High Frequency Traders.

Please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 if you would like any more information!

Altera Stratix® V GX/GS PCIe Board with VITA 57 FMC I/O Site or Dual QSFP+. Copyright BittWare.