5G UPF HCL Software Acceleration with Altera® FPGA IPU F2000X-PL Platform White Paper - UPF is a computationally intensive Network Function as well as it requires a considerable amount of memory resources for traffic counters implementing charging function, meters for traffic control as well as logic and memory resources for traffic management and QoS enforcement. Today UPF together with the entire 5G Core is moved into Cloud Native environment, careful attention must be given to the achievable performances and user quality of experience for all various supported services. This is where Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC) and Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) can play a significant role in improving the overall system performances while still avoiding any vendor lock-in or more in general worsening the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Operators.