I would be shocked to hear that they fabricated a chip. The cost and loss of flexibility vs an FPGA makes it unlikely. Very little is so static that the power and latency savings pays for itself. I wouldn't be surprised if these firms fabricated their own crypto ASICs though.
That's a good point. Since speed is one of the driving force in this business, software level cryptography won't be able to keep pace with such high speed transactions. Security has to be provided at the hardware level.
