COMSOL Multiphysics software lets you model just about anything from electromagnetic fields to structural mechanics and chemical reactions. While many of its capabilities fall outside the interest to electrical engineers, most electronics must operate in environments that include mechanical devices and often must work with power sources such as batteries. Thus, you may need to simulate and test how electronic designs interact with their physical surroundings, particularly when simulating heating and cooling.
COMSOL introduced Multiphysics v6.4 in October 2025 at its annual Boston conference with an official release date of November 18. Following the conference, EE World spoke with COMSOL’s SVP of product management Bjorn Sjodin to get a look at new features in v6.4 as well as an overview of the software for engineers who aren’t familiar with it.
COMSOL Multiphysics lets you model and simulate physical systems. It provides insight into how systems, circuits, and components will work once built. The software consists of modules for electromagnetics, chemistry, structural mechanics, acoustics, heat flow, and geometry (think PCB simulation), among others. Each module contains models of devices where you enter boundary conditions to build a model. The modules don’t just work in isolation, for they can interact with each other to create a system model, hence the name “Multiphysics.” In the image below, you can see how current traveling through interconnects can produce heat on a PCB. A video from the Boston conference (see link above) shows how the heat changes over time.
simulate PCB heating at connection points.
Electromagnetic simulations cover AC and DC analysis for low-frequency PCBs including voltage, current, capacitance, and inductance, both component values and parasitics. A demonstration at the conference showed how to use the software to model a capacitive touchscreen.
Sjodin noted that Comsol Multiphysics electromagnetic simulations include modules for:
- RF: antennas, transmission lines, waveguides, microwave ovens, component heating, and ESD. The screen image blow shows a microstrip patch antenna simulation.
- Wave optics: plasma modeling and semiconductor manufacturing.
- Electric high voltage discharges, similar to the plasma module.
- Semiconductor modeling.
- Heat transfer.
radiation pattern for a microstrip patch antenna.
What’s new in v6/4?
Here are two features that cross over all of the software. Version 6.4 adds many features outside of the EE-related modules.
Comsol Multiphysics v6.4 adds AI to the mix. During out conversation, Sjodin explained how COMSOL Multiphysics now includes a Chatbot window that lets you connect it to AI such as GPT-5, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and other OpenAI API-compatible models. The AI connection adds model-aware assistance to combine COMSOL documentation with information from the active simulation.
COMSOL v6.4 also adds NVIDIA cuDSS, a GPU-accelerated sparse direct solver library that’s optimized for hybrid CPU–GPU computation. It supports all recent NVIDIA GPU architectures. Depending on the hardware and model characteristics, which can reduce computing time compared to CPU-based direct solvers. COMSOL claims reduced computing times of 5x or greater.
