NovaLink provides four core benefits:

1.       Support implementation of advanced trading strategies

Because the Ticker Plant is off-loaded to a separate FPGA (or several separate FPGA in the case of a multi-feed system), more resources (logic gates, memories...) are freed on the trading FPGA to implement complex strategies that otherwise would never fit on a single FPGA. This includes strategies that can cover thousands of instruments across multiple feeds and asset classes.

2.       Accelerate time to market

Market Data feed handling represents a significant part of the work in developing a full FPGA tick-to-trade system. By integrating NovaLink in their full FPGA trading systems, trading firms have immediate access to NovaSparks extensive feed-handler catalog.

In addition, because the Ticker Plant has been off-loaded to a separate chip (or separate chips), the changes to the code of the strategy can be implemented and recompiled faster, independently from the market data processing component of the system, hence speeding up the development cycle and accelerating the overall time to market for a pure FPGA trading solution. 

3.       Contain development cost

FPGA developers are known to be expensive and scarce resources. By leveraging NovaSparks solutions, customers can relieve their FPGA development team from the task of developing and supporting multiple market data feed handlers.

Customers do not have to worry about allocating precious resources to handle new faster feeds for a market or to manage the flow of protocol changes that exchanges are constantly implementing. These types of changes are all managed by NovaSparks as part of the service.

4.       Increase robustness

NovaSparks pure FPGA Ticker Plants come with several critical robustness features typically found only in software solutions. These include support for exchange refresh and/or packet retransmission services, advanced arbiter, snapshot… Trading firms do not need to choose between speed and robustness anymore, even when deploying full FPGA trading system.