Frequently Asked Questions

A good start to get yourself familiar with computational electromagnetics would be the subject discussed at Wikipedia. Dr. S. M. Rao and Dr. N. Balakrishnan wrote a review article on this subject. Dr. A. Taflove has a magazine article "Why study electromagnetics: The first unit in an undergraduate electromagnetics course", [1041 kB] which gives the purpose behind the research.

If you are at McGill University, you will be looking at:

• ECSE 351 Electromagnetic Fields
• ECSE 352 Electromagnetic Waves
• ECSE 353 Electromagnetic Fields and Waves
• ECSE 405 Antenna Theory
• ECSE 443 Intro to Numerical Methods in Electrical Engineering
• ECSE 450 Electromagnetic Compatibility
• ECSE 451 EM Transmission and Radiation
• ECSE 488 High-frequency Lab

If you are at McGill University, you will be looking at:

• ECSE 508 Multi-agent Systems
• ECSE 524 Interconnects and Signal Integrity
• ECSE 543 Numerical Methods in Electrical Engineering
• ECSE 547 Finite Elements in Electrical Engineering
• ECSE 593 Antenna and Propagation
• ECSE 597 Circuit Simulators

Electromagnetic Theory:

• R. Harrington, "Time Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields"
• C. Balanis, "Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics"
• W. C. Chew, "Waves in Nonhomogeneous Media"
• J. Stratton, "Electromagnetic Theory"
• J. Jackson, "Classical Electrodynamics"

Computational Methods:

• A. Taflove, "Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-
• Difference Time-Domain Method"
• J. Jin, "The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics"
• P. Silvester and R. Ferrari, "Finite Elements for Electrical Engineers"
• R. Harrington, "Field Computation by Moment Methods"
• A. Ishimaru, "Electromagnetic Wave Propagation, Radiation, and Scattering"

Antenna Design:

• W. Stutzman and G. Thiele, "Antenna Theory and Design"
• C. Balanis, "Antenna Theory"

Numerical Methods:

• H. Schwarz, "Numerical analysis, a comprehensive introduction"
• J. Hoffman, "Numerical methods for engineers and scientists"
• G. Golub and C. van Loan, "Matrix computation"
• FOX, "Introduction to numerical linear algebra", Oxford University Press, 1964
• G. W. Stewart, "Introduction to matrix computations", Academic Press, 1973

Reference Books:

• W. Press et al., "Numerical Recipes: the Art of Scientific Computing"
• S. Zhang and J. Jin, "Computation of Special Functions"
• M. Abramowitz and I. Stegun, "Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables"
• A. Register, "A Guide to MATLAB Object-Oriented Programming"

As an international student, you need to apply for the graduate program at the ECE department and on the application form you would have the chance to specify the research group/area that you are interested in. Please check the with the department on the specific application deadline. The department will review the applications from Feburary to April of each year. Once the department has decided to grant you an admission, the School of Graduate Studies will send you the official letter of acceptance. McGill University is located in the province of Quebec. This letter of acceptance is firstly needed to apply for Quebec Acceptance Certificate (CAQ) through Immigration Quebec. Then with this letter and the CAQ, you will apply for the Study Permit through the local Consulate General of Canada. These two applications take variable length of time depending on your residing country. Once you have both the CAQ and the Study Permit, you could proceed to buy plane/train ticket to come to McGill.

If you are a little rusty in English writing, consider taking ELSN590 - Writing for Graduate Students offered by the Centre of Continuing Education, which covers the basic elements in writing. If you want to improve scientific writing in particular, REDM610 and REDM710 Writing Scientific Articles I and II are offered by the Faculty of Science. In REDM610, you will learn how to write a concise and appealing abstract, while REDM710 leads to write a full-blown research paper.

The most commonly used tools to write papers are Microsoft Office and Open Office. The commonly encountered graphs are generated in Matlab. Graphic softwares can be classified into two categories: one for handling raster graphics, like Photoshop, Gimp and one for handling vectorized graphics, like Illustrator, Visio, and Inkscape.

LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. It is particularly popular within the scentific community. It is available on Unix-based operating systems and it is ported to the Windows operating system through MikTeX. Any text editor can be used for editting LaTeX files. The popular choices include TeXnicCenter, NotePad++, and Emacs.

The most commonly used tool for presentation on Windows Systems is Power Point and TexPoint is a nice add-on package to support mathematical expressions. If you are proficient with LaTeX, consider use the Beamer package to avoid reinventing the wheels. Here we provide a simple template for the panel-based posters [72 kB] as seen here. The poster is partitioned into smaller panels in contrast to one big page. This brings the ease to fit in a suitcase as one travels for conferences.

The department official thesis template can be acquired here [132 kB], which was fetched from the Telecommunications & Signal Processing Laboratory website at here on October 29, 2009.

You can download a LaTeX-inspired PowerPoint template of our CompEM lab from here [1.21 MB]. All relevant details on how to use the template are under the notes of Slide #2.

Are there any people/research labs/companies doing works related to computational electromagnetics?
Yes. There are many labs doing research in microwave applications. If there is a need to write customized code, inevitably they have to look for the right computational techniques. There are also research labs and faculties primarily focusing the computational techniques themselves. The most notable places are

• Centre for Computational Electromagnetics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne
• Computational Electromagnetics Research Laboratory, McMaster University
• Computational Electromagnetics Laboratory, University Wisconsin-Madison
• Computational Electromagnetics Research Laboratory, University of Victoria
• Northwest Electromagnetics and Acoustics Research Laboratory, Portland State University
• ElectroScience Laboratory, Ohio State University
• Clemson Vehicular Electronics Laboratory, Clemson University

Computational techniques, such as finite-element method, finite-difference time-domain method, integral equation method, etc. have matured over the last two decades. Softwares based on these techniques are readily available. Some of the companies that manufacture commercial softwares are

Ansoft Comsol ElectromagneticWorks EM Software and Systems Infolytica Lumerical

Remcom RSoft Speag Sonnet WIPL-D Zeland

• IEEE Transaction on Magnetics
• IEEE Transaction on Antennas and Propagation
• IEEE Transaction on Microwave Theory and Technology
• IEEE Antenna and Wireless Propagation Letters
• International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering
• Journal of Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society
• Journal of Computational Mathematics
• Journal of Computational Physics
• Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations
• Progress in Electromagnetic Research (PIER)
• SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis
• SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing

• Schulich Library would probably be the best research resource. It has a wealthy collection of books, in which math-related books are located on the third floor, electromagnetics-related books are located on the fourth floor. If the book is not available in the Catalog, you could request it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). The delivery usually takes 3 days to a week.


• McGill libraries have subscription to many current research journals. However, most often you would like to search by the title of a paper rather than the name of the journal. The abstract indexing database becomes handy in this case. The two popular ones are Google Scholar and Compendex.


• Disserations are good source of research information since they are written by peer students and contain wealthier information than papers. McGill has subscription of the digital disserations through ProQuest.


• Reference management softwares are handy to have as the amount of information rises. McGill provides EndNote, Reference Manager, and ReadCube. JabRef is a free software.

The most commonly used programming tool is Matlab. We also often program in C++ for its efficiency and flexibility and program in C for its nice interfacing with hardware.

If you work on Windows, Visual Studio is the commonly development environment. If you work on Unix-like operating systems, Eclipse is the commonly development environment. Emacs/GCC/GDB is also recommended but it has a steep learning curve. Cygwin is a nice tool to test unix-based softwares on Windows operating system. And Subversion is commonly used for do version control of source code.

Check Microsoft DreamSpark and Free Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus software for McGill students.

Computing resources are provided through individual professors. CLUMEQ Supercomputing Center is accessible to offer further support on intensive computing jobs. If you are doing experiments, commonly needed equipments like network analyzers, anechoic chambers, are available through Telecommunications & Signal Processing Laboratory, Microelectronics And Computer Systems Laboratory and Photonic System Group.

One classic place all graduate students visit is PhD Comics. The book titled "Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an MA or a Ph.D." is also a popular read among graduate students. If you need more than being mentally away from work, EEGSS has a student lounge with a TV and a Foosball table in the basement of McConnell Building. In addition, Thomson House of PGSS is the named the best Graduate Student's Club in North America. And McGill Gym is only five-minute walk away from McConnell Engineering Building.