Altera's Stratix V FPGA with integrated 10GigE and PCIe Gen 2 is ideal for financial applications requiring ultra-low latency

CONCORD, NH - January 17, 2012 - BittWare, a provider of fully-validated, deployable Altera-based off-the-shelf FPGA and signal processing boards, announced today the First Customer Shipment (FCS) of the S5-PCIe to a technology leader in the finance and trading industry. The S5-PCIe is the first of a family of PCI Express slot-cards that BittWare is offering to the financial acceleration/HFT (High Frequency Trading) market. Providing CPU offload, the highest performance transceivers, and optional TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine), the S5-PCIe is a PCIe-compliant deployable slot-card based on the industry's highest performance FPGA - Altera's Stratix® V. With maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements and 10GigE straight to the FPGA (no conversion to XAUI) for ultra-low latency, the S5-PCIe is ideal for applications in the high frequency trading market where trades are executed in microseconds, and the ability to minimize the delay between market data arrival and issuing the trade is of the utmost importance.

"In the world of high frequency trading, the lowest latency solution takes the cake," said Darren Taylor, Senior VP of Sales & Marketing at BittWare. "Our S5-PCIe fulfills this need from all sides. With multiple lanes of 10GigE straight to the FPGA and PCI Express Gen 2, combined with on-board memory and optional TOE, as well as additional built-in support for 40 GigE and PCIe Gen3, the financial industry has taken notice."

S5-PCIe Details

BittWare's S5-PCIe (S5PE) is a PCIe x8 card based on the high-bandwidth, power-efficient Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGA. Designed for high-end applications, the Stratix V provides a high level of system integration and flexibility for I/O, routing, and processing. When combined with BittWare's Anemone™ FPGA co-processor and ATLANTiS™ FrameWork FPGA development kit, the S5PE creates a flexible and efficient solution for high-performance signal processing and data acquisition. The board supports DDR3 SDRAM with error-correcting codes (ECC). Providing additional flexibility are up to two VITA 57 FMC sites for enhancing the board's I/O and processing capabilities. The board also has the option of two front-panel QSFP+ cages for serial I/O.

The S5PE is the first card in BittWare's family of Altera Stratix V PCIe boards. Additional boards offering QSFP, SFP+, QDRII, RLDRAM3 and half-size formats will be introduced and released in late Q1 2012.

About BittWare, Inc.

For over two decades, BittWare has designed and deployed high-end signal processing board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to revenue for our OEM customers. Our solutions leverage the latest FPGA technology from Altera and our Anemone FPGA co-processing chip which reduces FPGA power and complexity by hosting C language aspects of a signal processing application. BittWare's solutions are based upon industry standard COTS form factors including PCIe, AMC, VPX / OpenVPX, VME / VXS, CompactPCI, PCI, XMC, FMC (VITA 57), and PMC. When power and space-constrained challenges make it difficult to use industry-standard boards, BittWare can provide modified solutions, licensed designs, and/or chip-level products for applications in the military/aerospace, high end instrumentation and telecommunications infrastructure markets. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA COTS solutions, visit www.bittware.com.

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