Nucleus vs. WinCE vs. Linux

Mentor is fighting against Windows CE and Linux. The company says that their platform has more complete hardware support (e.g., it has better peripheral support than a standard Linux build) and that Nucleus has a much smaller footprint than WinCE or Linux. Nucleus also offers higher real-time performance by supporting such features as tightly-coupled memory and DMA transfers.

One big disadvantage of Nucleus is that it lacks the large development community of open platforms like Win CE or Linux. Developers working with Nucleus will have access to a much smaller base of existing code. To ameliorate this disadvantage, Mentor offers Inflexion, an "advanced UI engine" that allows designers to use drag-and-drop tools to quickly generate code. According to Mentor, it is much easier to build a UI with inflexion than it is to build a UI using Linux or WinCE. For resource constrained applications, this platform looks like a compelling option.