This document composes information regarding the development of the RISC-V platform for a VPN Gateway. Starting with the definition of common terms in Chapter 2, the document covers the RISC-V market analysis in Chapter 3 and the current state of RISC-V instruction set architectures (ISAs) and extensions (ISEs) in Chapter 4. Since the development of custom RISC-V platforms commonly relates to the development of the corresponding ISEs, Chapter 5 provides a detailed information on this topic. The necessity of custom ISEs for the VPN Gateway is described in Chapter 6. Its results are used in Chapter 7 for the estimation of required hardware resources. Further in Chapter 8, these requirements are used to choose an appropriate hardware platform for system prototyping.

The BSI decided to publish the results of Project 647 RACE-I in English, as the global standard language for science, engineering and technology. A vast majority of the relevant documents to processor architectures and in particular to the RISC-V architecture are written in English. Moreover, using English ensures that this document can reach a wider audience, including international partners as part of the public tendering procedure for the successor project RACE-II. It also facilitates the understanding, as most technical terminology and documentation for the RISC-V architecture are written in English.