How does a 40 Gbit/s Ethernet interface process packets in silicon?
40G Ethernet is really four physical 10G links running in parallel. Modern FPGAs have SERDES hardware that can run at well over 10 Gbps, and it's common to use four 32-bit buses running at 312.5 MHz inside the FPGA. That gives you a data rate of exactly 40.000 Gbps.