Impulse offers FPGA-based financial feed handling solutions

SAN FRANCISCO—Impulse Accelerated Technologies has delivered an FPGA-based financial feed and network packet parsing solution to Athena Capital Research LLC, a New York-based quantitative investment manager, the company said Wednesday (Dec. 9).

Impulse (Kirkland, Wash.) offers customer-programmable feed handling solutions for use in automated trading, arbitrage and real-time analytics, the company said.

"FPGAs are increasingly finding their way into financial feed management operations due to their inherently deterministic behavior and ability to support ultra-low latency and reduced power consumption relative to software-based solutions," said David Buechner, vice president of business development at Impulse, in a statement.

Evan Wies, the chief technology officer at Athena Capital Research, said the company significantly reduced latency using an FPGA-based feed handler.

"Using familiar C tools, we can continually improve the proprietary parts of this system without any intellectual property concerns, which is a distinct competitive advantage for our firm," Wies said.

Impulse FPGA-based feed handling systems include customer-programmable elements, optimized network and host processor I/O, and integration into a customer selected server, according to the company.

Impulse systems include the customer's choice of commercial FPGA hardware, a customized HDL infrastructure, Impulse C-to-FPGA software, a reference design and documentation, the company said. Prices start at $90,000 and carry no run time royalty or monthly leasing fees.