The thesis aims for the development of a configurable and extensible hardware architecture to monitor a proprietary protocol, called Sakura, for high-speed communication links. The project issued from the need of an item capable of capturing and analyzing the data traffic exchanged in a specific modular test infrastructure developed by Advantest Corporation. The involved parts are connected through optical links and their communication is built upon the 40GBASE-SR Ethernet standard. The system is thus founded on the adoption of high-speed technologies able to support the transmission of large quantities of data at high data rates. In such infrastructures, exploiting the existing communication modules to have access to the exchanged information at different levels of protocol abstraction might be unfeasible, due to the large resources and heavy workload required.