Customer Background
The customer is a leading financial technology company providing real-time trading, digital banking, and secure payment infrastructure for global markets. Operating under strict compliance frameworks, their systems handle millions of high-value transactions every second. To maintain trust, prevent data breaches, and ensure business continuity, the customer required a hardware-accelerated communication platform that delivers sub-microsecond latency, secure data storage, and zero-trust security all while scaling to future workload and compliance demands.
Challenges & Requirements
The customer faced growing complexity in achieving high performance and security within a compliance-driven FinTech ecosystem. Their infrastructure demanded deterministic, sub-microsecond latency and sustained 100G–400G network throughput to meet real-time trading and transaction demands. Traditional CPU-based architectures struggled to maintain this speed while performing encryption, packet inspection, and security enforcement. Additionally, they needed on-card encrypted storage with ECC protection to safeguard sensitive data in compliance with PCI DSS and SOC 2 regulations. Inline firewalling, intrusion detection, and TLS termination were also required to uphold a zero-trust security model without impacting throughput. Finally, the platform had to remain flexible and programmable, allowing quick adaptation to new encryption standards, protocols, and evolving financial compliance mandates.
iWave Scope of Work:
- Programmable FPGA Based Acceleration: Implemented line-rate processing up to 400G, offloading packet inspection, encryption, timestamping, and flow control from the host CPU to achieve sub-microsecond deterministic latency.
- Integrated Security Offloads: Embedded FPGA logic handled zero-trust firewalling, TLS 1.3 termination, network intrusion detection (NIDS), and encrypted audit trails directly at the hardware level, ensuring secure communication with no performance compromise.
- Onboard Secure Storage: Leveraged triple NVMe slots and DDR4 ECC memory with AES-256 encryption and secure boot protocols, enabling high-speed, tamper-proof local storage within the SmartNIC.
- CPU Resource Optimization: Reduced host CPU utilization by up to 50%, freeing system resources for high-level financial analytics and real-time fraud detection.
- Scalable Architecture: The reconfigurable FPGA fabric ensured adaptability to future network protocols, evolving security algorithms, and compliance standards making the system future-proof.
Solution Highlights
- Deterministic 400G network acceleration for financial workloads
- Inline hardware encryption and zero-trust firewalling
- AES-256 secure storage with ECC-protected memory
- Up to 50% CPU resource optimization
- Scalable FPGA fabric for evolving network and compliance needs
