SemiWiki: High Frequency Trading and EDA

By Bernard Murphy

Pop quiz – name an event at which an EDA vendor would be unlikely to exhibit. How about The Trading Show in Chicago, later this month? That’s trading as in markets, high-frequency trading, blockchain and all that other trading-centric financial technology. This is another market, like cloud, where performance is everything and returns easily justify investments in hardware design.

Of course, what these people are aiming to build is not smartphones or routers in the very latest semiconductor processes. They’re much more interested in personalized design – specialized applications (in this case high-frequency trading – HFT) built for proprietary advantage and never intended to be offered in the open market. And like their compatriots in the cloud, they’re very attracted to FPGA-based design for its flexibility, the rapidly increasing capability in those platforms and (comparatively) low development cost.