Hertzon

🎬 Watch the 90-second tour: what Hertzon does today and what comes next.

⚠️ Hertzon is under active development. It can still contain bugs, which are being fixed step by step. Please verify important results independently and report problems as GitHub issues.

🌐 Website: c8501024.github.io/Hertzon

Hertzon Electromagnetic Design Suite: an open-source suite for co-design by engineers and AI agents. At its core is a 3D full-wave electromagnetic simulator (FEM, frequency domain) for antennas, microwave filters, waveguides, PCB structures and radar cross section, with 3D modelling in a modern interface, the workflow of the established design tools and high accuracy from adaptive meshing and curved elements: draw or import the model, assign boundaries and excitations, add an analysis setup with adaptive meshing, add frequency sweeps, analyze, then look at S-parameters, fields and radiation patterns. Circuit designs with lumped parts and transmission lines turn into 3D layouts and back.

🤝 The vision: co-design with AI. Every design is made by an engineer and an AI agent together. Hertzon provides its methods (modelling, adaptive solving, sweeps, optimizers, derivative tuning, circuits, PCB import, and next the topology optimization from the author's research) as tools that an AI agent calls through MCP (what is MCP?). The AI picks and combines the methods; the engineer sets the goal, sees every step in the open window and decides.

Hertzon is by Dominik Mair. Its FEM solver core, EMerge, is by Robert Fennis.

📘 New to Hertzon? Start with the step-by-step tutorial: a waveguide with wave ports, a coaxial cable, a half-wave dipole and the RCS of a sphere, each from the empty window to the result, your own result quantities with equations, a stub filter as a circuit with its 3D layout, a board imported from Gerber files, plus how to let an AI assistant (Claude Code, Codex, VS Code) build and run simulations for you through Hertzon's MCP server.

Solver core: EMerge. The finite-element solver core of Hertzon is EMerge, the open-source FEM solver by Robert Fennis: the Nédélec formulation, element matrices, ports, boundary conditions, the solver interface, the error estimate and the AURA mesh refinement are his work, and so is the SPARTA direct solver that Hertzon offers as an option. Thanks to Robert for making EMerge available under the GPL.

Around this core, Hertzon brings its own parts: the graphical workflow, a circuit simulator with schematics that turn into 3D layouts and back, PCB import from Gerber and Excellon files with the stackup, the adaptive pass loop with its convergence criteria, a second local refinement method (hzmesh, local Delaunay), fast and interpolating sweeps with parallel sweep points, far-field and RCS post-processing (also of half and quarter models with symmetry planes), optimizers, parametric sweeps, derivative tuning with mesh morphing, solving on remote and cloud machines, and the MCP server.

Some solver features were developed in Hertzon and contributed to EMerge: the curved (isoparametric) elements on curved surfaces, hzAURA (AURA with cavity re-meshing, so refined curved surfaces stay exact), multi-mode wave ports, the far field of all ports in one pass and the parallel removal of PEC unknowns (all in EMerge's hertzon branch), as well as the concave-wedge flip for AURA and fixes to port modes, far fields with symmetry planes and the PARDISO interface (in EMerge main).

Hertzon is a desktop application (Qt + VTK) built for responsiveness with large models: geometry is tessellated incrementally per object, the solver runs in its own process, and results are streamed back into the GUI while it keeps working.

Hertzon is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with any vendor of commercial simulation software.

Install

Download the installers from the Releases page.

Windows installer: run Hertzon-Setup-<version>.exe. It installs Hertzon for your user (no administrator rights) into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Hertzon, adds it to the start menu, the desktop and Settings > Apps (uninstall there), opens .hzn projects with Hertzon and sets up the Python environment (about 1 GB download) before it finishes.

Updates: when a new version is out, Hertzon shows its release notes in a small dialog after the start (at most once every 7 days) with Install, Skip this version and Later; Help > Check for Updates... checks at any time. Install downloads the installer, checks it and keeps your settings and the Python environment. The check can be switched off in Tools > Options > General, or with HERTZON_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗