FPGA in High-Frequency Trading: The Complete Guide
Why trading firms moved the critical path from CPUs to FPGAs, what runs in hardware, how teams build it, what it costs — and when software is still good enough.
Low-Latency Hardware
FPGAs, tick-to-trade latency, kernel bypass networking, smart NICs, layer 1 switches, Linux tuning and low-latency C++.
Low-Latency Hardware: an overview
When the network is as fast as physics allows, the remaining edge lives inside the server. FPGAs, kernel bypass and careful systems engineering shave the final microseconds and nanoseconds.
We explain the hardware and software stack behind competitive tick-to-trade numbers and where each technology is worth its cost.
Latest Low-Latency Hardware research
Browse all research Key concepts
- Tick-to-trade
- Time from a market data packet arriving at a firm to the resulting order leaving it.
- Kernel bypass
- Networking that moves packets directly between the NIC and user space, avoiding operating-system overhead.
- FPGA
- A reconfigurable chip that runs trading logic directly in hardware with deterministic latency.
Research roadmap
What we cover in Low-Latency Hardware
Our editorial plan for this section. Published guides are linked; the rest are in research.
- Live FPGA in High-Frequency Trading: The Complete Guide
- Soon Tick-to-Trade Latency Explained
- Soon Kernel Bypass Networking for Low-Latency Trading
- Soon Choosing a Low-Latency NIC for Trading
- Soon Layer 1 and Ultra-Low Latency Switches for Trading
- Soon Linux Tuning for Low-Latency Trading: A Checklist
- Soon Writing Low-Latency C++ for Trading Systems