I doubt it. HFT is a shrinking industry. Solarflare implements their high end NICs using FPGAs, so they have deep expertise in FPGA implementations of network s

I doubt it. HFT is a shrinking industry. Solarflare implements their high end NICs using FPGAs, so they have deep expertise in FPGA implementations of network stuff, as well as integrating those implementations with the host OS (ie, writing drivers). My guess is they're interested in offerings related to what's commonly called "software defined networking": running multiple virtual networks over a single physical network, dynamic route optimization, load balancing, etc. This is a key building block of cloud computing, which is a fast growing industry. Implementing it in FPGA firmware instead of actual software makes a lot of sense, so I suspect Xilinx is planning to improve it's offerings in this area.