Uh :-). I said electromagnetism because it sounds waaay less pretentious than what it was generally termed -- computational electromagnetism -- and because claiming it was microelectronics, while technically correct, was somewhat frowned upon at our university because we were in the wrong department for that. Politics and whatnot.<p>We were doing research on simulation and model extraction techniques for passive structures in very high-frequency (think 30 GHz) integrated circuits. At these frequencies, the lumped-element approximations break down, so you can&#x27;t describe the functioning of passive devices in the familiar manner, based on Kirchhof&#x27;s equations et co.. That means SPICE-family tools can&#x27;t give you proper results anymore, and you kind of need them to design the circuit.<p>The &quot;proper&quot; way to do it is full-wave simulation; unfortunately -- especially for very wide-band devices -- that&#x27;s computationally very costly (simulating the behaviour of the device at a specific frequency isn&#x27;t very cheap on its own, but we&#x27;re talking about simulating it for a whole range of frequencies, which could span tens of GHz). You could plug those results into SPICE, of course, but running these simulations took hours, sometimes even days, for a single run, which is completely impractical. It&#x27;s also not the level you want to work at when designing circuits -- where you&#x27;re solving &quot;circuit problems&quot;, not &quot;field problems&quot;.<p>So what we were trying to do was:<p>a) Figure out how to make the simulations faster and more accurate, and<p>b) Figure out how to extract a model from them, i.e. an equivalent circuit, which could be readily used by the design engineers.<p>We did that through a combination of things like running as few simulations as possible and extrapolating, running simulations in parallel and so on. It wasn&#x27;t some major scientific breakthrough, but then again, I worked there during my 3rd and 4th year of university; it was the most difficult kind of work I&#x27;d done until that point.