Ansys EMC Plus & Ansys Charge Plus: 26R1 What’s New
Ansys EMC Plus and Ansys Charge Plus 2026 Release 1 (26R1) was made available in March. This will be the only release from Electro Magnetic Applications, Inc. (EMA) in 2026.
“It’s a big release for us,” said EMA Lead Product Manager Kevin-Druis Merenda. “We’re pretty excited to showcase all the new capabilities that we have in 26R1 including a lot of advancements in automation and post-processing capabilities.”
Ansys EMC Plus
Ansys EMC Plus is a platform-level electromagnetic modeling and simulation tool that delivers design-to-validation workflow for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). Application areas include electromagnetic environmental effects (E3), cables, electromagnetic interference (EMI)/ EMC, and radio frequency interference (RFI).
Highlight new functions in 26R1 include:
- 3D-layout PCB import and meshing capability
- RE102 automatic workflow
- Cable management improvements
3D-Layout PCB Import and Meshing
EMA has developed a new workflow in EMA3D Connect to import and mesh printed circuit boards (PCBs) quickly. EMA3D Connect is EMA’s advanced data processing and visualization tool, designed to work alongside Ansys Discovery. Compared to Discovery, 3D Connect imports PCBs about five times faster and meshes them up to 500 times faster.
3D Connect simplifies complex PCB geometries to accelerate setup and reduce overhead for electromagnetic analysis of boards. Imported data includes layers, nets, components, and meshes.
Users open 3D Connect by clicking the Connect icon in the top toolbar, then selecting Import a PCB from the menu. The workflow allows users to directly import PCB and component data in EDB format, preserving the full layout and stackup without converting the design to boundary-representation (BREP) CAD. After importing, users can interactively view individual layers in 2D, filter by layers, components, and nets. Users can also mesh in the native geometry.
3D Connect then sends the PCB outline, along with renderings of traces, components, and the mesh to Discovery using the “Send to Discovery” button.
Figure 1 shows the process of opening 3D Connect and importing a PCB.
RE102 Automatic Workflow
The new RE102 automated workflow speeds up radiated emission (RE) source extraction and reverse propagation. RE102 is a radiated emissions test requirement defined in MIL-STD-461 to control EMI.
The problem is that supplier boards and components often arrive without design files, leaving engineers to rely solely on measured RE data, complicating system-level integration. This new automatic workflow completes reverse propagation to find RE data.
Users access the workflow by opening 3D Connect and selecting Reverse Propagation in the Start a Workflow tab. 3D Connect converts far-field measurements into calibrated near-field equivalent sources. It runs multiple simulations to dial in a validated emitting source. The calibrated source plugs into the full platform to qualify system-level EMI risk to nearby receivers.
Figure 2 illustrates this process on an aircraft including results visualization.
Cable Management Improvements
Four new updates are making cable management easier.
First, the centerline extraction tool is now built into the UI. Simply select it to extract the exact center of imported 3D cables, such as those from CATIA, and automatically generate a spline.
Another new capability is pre-meshing cable discretization directly within the geometry. This allows cables to be refined, edited, and adjusted before the full system mesh is generated, ensuring proper connectivity and avoiding conflicts with surrounding geometry. The cable mesh converter provides precise control over cable routing early in the workflow, resulting in a cleaner, more reliable mesh and reducing issues later in the simulation process.
Additionally, cable deconfliction capabilities have been enhanced to streamline setup and resolve long-standing challenges in complex cable and harness modeling. New options allow users to choose different deconfliction types, including materials-based and line-to-line deconfliction. Depending on the selected algorithm, overlapping cables are automatically rerouted in the CAD model, eliminating mesh connectivity conflicts without manual intervention. The new settings can be found in Settings under the Meshing tab.
Finally, MHARNESS is now compatible with the variable grid, eliminating the need for fixed refinement regions while allowing cables to bend and route naturally for greater modeling flexibility and reduced simulation time. In the setup shown in Figure 3, the runtime was cut in half.
Fig. 3. Comparison of MHARNESS constant grid and variable grid.
Previously, maintaining a consistent structured grid around cable harnesses significantly increased element count and computational cost, since resolution had to be enforced across the entire grid extent. With this update, initial refinement is no longer required, dramatically reducing mesh size while preserving accuracy. Comparisons between the original and updated mesh settings, Figure 4, show nearly identical voltage probe results, confirming that the constraint can be removed without impacting analysis fidelity.
Ansys Charge Plus
Ansys Charge Plus combines electromagnetic solvers, fluid solvers, and particle physics solvers for easy-to-use multiphysics simulation. Application areas include space and radiation environment effects, discharge modeling, electrostatic discharge (ESD) testing, and plasma chambers.
Headline new features in 26R1 include:
- Restart simulations from initial conditions
- GPU accelerations of PIC/FEM and radiation transport
- Discharge pollutant modeling
Restart Simulations from Initial Conditions
A key differentiator of Charge Plus is its ability to solve plasma problems in the time domain while still advancing efficiently over macroscopic timescales. It captures extremely fast particle dynamics, such as electron and ion motion on the order of picoseconds, yet can simulate processes that evolve over seconds, like etching and edge formation, by leveraging an accelerated time-stepping scheme.
Improvements to the semi-implicit formulation now enforce both energy and charge conservation, grounded in fundamental principles such as Gauss’s Law. This is critical for maintaining plasma stability when mesh sizes are too large to resolve the Debye length, which would otherwise introduce numerical heating. With these energy-conserving schemes, the solver can use mesh sizes 10- 100x larger than the Debye length while keeping plasma stable, enabling efficient and accurate time-domain simulations.
By leveraging energy-conserving schemes in the time-domain solver, users can now restart simulations from initial conditions. Charge Plus takes any CFD simulation input for the bulk species and models the plasma. An advantage of this approach is the ability to balance mesh resolution with computational efficiency when modeling high plasma densities. Even with energy-conserving schemes, resolving densities on the order of 1017 electrons/m³ can require a very fine mesh, particularly when approaching the tau-region, where a coarse mesh is insufficient for accurate PIC solutions. Instead of using a fine mesh throughout the entire ramping phase, the problem can be solved incrementally, starting with a coarser mesh to reach a stable solution at lower densities and then mapping that solution onto progressively finer meshes. This staged approach enables accurate resolution of high-density plasmas while reducing overall computational cost.
Figure 5 show a simulation that went unstable starting around 5.5e-7 and was restarted at 5e-7 and ran to 1e-6 with no stability issues. This allows for fast initial simulations and then higher resolution refinements.
Fig. 5. Example of starting a simulation with a higher resolution mesh for stability improvements.
Additional plasma-enhanced semiconductor manufacturing updates include:
- Flow effects on energy and angular distribution functions
- GPU acceleration for full 3D simulations of chambers
- Monitoring IEADFs on a wafer surface
GPU accelerations of PIC/FEM and radiation transport
New in 26R1, radiation transport Monte Carlo code is now GPU-accelerated, delivering performance improvements that dramatically reduce analysis time.
For photon kerma calculations, simulations now run up to 10,000x faster on GPU compared to CPU, while full electron and positron transport achieves ~1,000x acceleration on an RTX 4090 versus a 20-core CPU. This means running complex dose deposition and transport analysis in just minutes.
This scales across multiple GPUs and sustains performance of roughly 300,000 particle histories per GPU per second, compared to about 70 histories per CPU core per second.
Discharge Pollutant Modeling
New pollutant modeling capabilities allow users to simulate how particulate contamination enhances electric fields within small gaps.
By applying a reference field to a pollutant geometry, the tool computes a field enhancement factor for the local fields around the particle. This enhancement factor can then be extracted and applied at the macroscopic gap level to accurately reduce the predicted breakdown voltage. Users can select predefined geometries such as spheres or prisms, or define custom shapes, along with pollutant size, density, and the computed enhancement factor, Figure 6.
Figure 7 compare results without pollutants to those with pollutants. It shows that electron density rises earlier when pollutants are present, triggering breakdown sooner due to accelerated ionization and earlier onset of the Townsend avalanche within the gap.
Fig. 7. Comparison of results without pollutants to those with pollutants. With pollutant results show that breakdown happens sooner.
Start Now
Take a closer look at all the new functions and performance improvements in the Solving Electromagnetic Challenges webinar “Ansys EMC Plus and Ansys Charge Plus 26R1: What’s New.”
EMA develops and validates EMC Plus and Charge Plus. It is available exclusively through Ansys, which is now part of Synopsys. To learn more, click here.
EMA uses these tools to solve tough electromagnetic problems in product design. We are available to support your projects from beginning to end. For more on our consulting services, reach out to us by clicking here.
