‘Game changer’ is an overused phrase, but when used by EETimes’ veteran correspondent Max Maxfield, it commands attention. He was referring to a new technology from Xilinx, which claims to extend software defined network (SDN) approaches from the control plane to the data plane. In current SDN, the control plane is software defined but the data plane is still implemented in inflexible, often proprietary, hardware, because its packet processing functions are too compute-intensive to be performed in software. That means that the data plane remains dependent on expensive ASIC chips and SoCs, which have to be upgraded in the field, not by programming. Xilinx is not stranger to new concepts. It pioneered the fabless model and invented the FPGA (field…