One of the features of the new open ecosystem for telco networks is the rising use of merchant silicon rather than custom ASIC chips, to drive the new economics of the white box servers, switches and routers (see separate item). However, off-the-shelf chips come with trade-offs, and even Intel has backed away from the idea that a processor, even a powerful beast like a top end Xeon, can support all the rarefied functions and demanding requirements of a carrier network by itself. Enter the FPGA (field programmable gate array), which can be programmed for particular functions, without going the full custom route. In the telco environment, FPGAs are increasingly used to support specialized coprocessors that can offload the most demanding…