Acceleration of Trading System Back End with FPGAs Using High-Level Synthesis Flow

FPGA technology is widely used in the finance domain. We describe the design of a financial trading system order processing component using FPGAs, implemented with high-level synthesis (HLS) flow. The order processing component is the major contributor to increased delays and low throughput in the current software implementation of trading systems. The objective of FPGA implementation is to reduce the latency of order processing and increase the throughput of trading systems as compared to software implementation. Our design is one of the first attempts to speed up order processing in a trading system using FPGA technology and HLS flow. HLS was used in implementing the design for higher productivity and faster turnaround time. The design shows orders of magnitude of improvement in performance indicating that more complex FPGA systems could be designed using HLS. We obtained more than 2X of an advantage in order processing speed and a reduction in latency with FPGA technology. Moreover, we gained a 4X advantage in terms of productivity using HLS.