It's possible but because there are other fabric/data-plane ASICs are are not an order of magnitude harder than Cisco's chips most time is spent on those instea

It's possible but because there are other fabric/data-plane ASICs are are not an order of magnitude harder than Cisco's chips most time is spent on those instead. The problem with the Cisco ones is mostly because they sit somewhere in between FPGAs and a Barrel CPU. Without the custom loading and init they are essentially useless. Think of them as an FPGA with a softcore CPU. If they are empty they have no CPU so you can't run code on them. If you fill them with Cisco core data you get no use out of them without logging in to their DRM server. So you need to feed them the softcore but without the cisco runtime code.