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

NovaSparks Adds NovaLink to Provide FPGA to FPGA Tick to Trade Link

Subscribe to our newsletter

NovaSparks has added NovaLink to its portfolio of field programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions, creating an FPGA-to-FPGA tick to trade link that allows trading firms to receive NovaSparks ticker plant market data directly into their FPGA trading systems.

NovaLink avoids the need for market data to be consumed by data server software and distributed using either PCIe or Ethernet Multicast links and instead allows data to be consumed through an application programming interface running on an FPGA and including a normalised interface.

Using NovaLink, trading firms can offload feed handler functions from their algo strategy and order entry FPGA chips to the NovaTick ticker plant, giving them more space on their FPGAs to implement large scale trading strategies that won’t otherwise fit on a single chip.

Olivier Baetz, chief operating officer at NovaSparks, explains: “Many trading firms put market data, their algo strategy and order entry on one FPGA. As there is very little room on an FPGA, this means compromises must be made, perhaps there will be only one market data feed on the chip, a simple strategy or limited order entry. Using NovaLink to offload market data feed handlers to other FPGAs in NovaTick leaves room for trading firms to implement more sophisticated strategies that can consume thousands of instruments across many markets and asset classes.”

Baetz acknowledges that the use of two FPGAs includes an extra hop and means the NovaTick and NovaLink solution may not necessarily be the fastest, but says it is still very fast and suggests traders wanting to implement sophisticated strategies will find it interesting. In terms of speed and measuring from the wire on the market side to the trading firms’ FPGA, average latency using NovaLink is 1 microsecond for order based feeds like Nasdaq Total ITCH, and 750 nanoseconds for level based feeds like Chicago Mercantile Exchange MDP3.

A couple of NovaSparks customers are beta testing NovaLink, which is available immediately and is expected to find favour among high frequency and other speed traders. Baetz says: “While a number of vendors sell individual components of ticker systems that must be assembled to develop trading strategies, NovaSparks offers a turnkey ticker platform that is dedicated to market data, includes a fully featured feed handler and is based on FPGAs. It doesn’t require developer work and allows trading firms to avoid the expense of developing and maintaining feed handlers.”

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

Genesis Launches MCP Server to Bridge AI Agents with Enterprise Applications

Genesis Global, the application development framework provider, has introduced a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server to provide a controlled and compliant interface between large language models (LLMs) and enterprise applications built on its platform. The MCP Server supports the emerging open MCP standard, which aims to unify how software applications deliver operational and contextual data to...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

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...