About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Nasdaq Releases FPGA-Accelerated Data Feed

Subscribe to our newsletter

Nasdaq has gone live with a version of its TotalView Itch full depth equities feed driven by FPGA technology. The feed is being directed at trading firms that are particularly latency sensitive, with no queuing during data bursts that occur at peak trading periods.

The TotalView Itch 4.1 FPGA feed is identical in format to the standard feed, which is processed and distributed using software-only code. As such, receiving applications can hook up to the FPGA feed without any modifications.

That said, because there is no queuing, messages on the FPGA feed can contain multiple price updates and so message sizes could be larger than the standard feed, up to 9,000 bytes in total. Recipients need to connect via 10G or 40G links, and should be able to handle data bursts up to 2,000 messages in a millisecond.

The FPGA feed is available only from Nasdaq’s primary Carteret, NJ data centre, and not from the exchange’s backup facility in northern Virginia. Trading firms taking the feed are likely to co-locate at the primary data centre.

A Nasdaq spokesperson confirms industry reports that the data feed was developed by in-house developers working with an unnamed development partner. The FPGA vendor has also not been named, though industry sources suggest that Altera is the supplier.

Nasdaq’s move is interesting in that it’s possibly the first instance where data feed distribution technology has been deployed leveraging FPGAs, in contrast to data feed receiving systems that increasingly use FPGAs for such tasks as message decoding, and order book building. As such, the development might be a pointer to other exchanges and liquidity venues adopting hardware acceleration technologies to boost performance, to match that of the market participants that execute via them.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

BLOG

SOLVE Expands AI-Powered Municipal Bond Pricing Tool with Relative Value Analysis Feature

SOLVE, the provider of pre-trade data and predictive pricing for fixed income markets, has introduced a new Relative Value Analysis capability to its AI-driven municipal bond pricing platform, SOLVE Px. The enhancement is aimed at improving transparency and decision-making for municipal bond traders, portfolio managers, and risk teams. The newly released feature allows users to...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...