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Arena Physica Collaborates with Microsoft to Bring Electromagnetic Superintelligence to Microsoft DiscoveryArena Physica's Heaviside, the first foundation model for electromagnetism, brings AI-powered electromagnetic design to the RF, photonics, and semiconductor ecosystem on Microsoft Discovery NEW YORK, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Arena Physica announced that Heaviside, its foundation model for electromagnetism, is now available on Microsoft Discovery, Microsoft's platform for agentic engineering.
Every electromagnetic design problem reduces to the same question: how will this design actually behave once built? Answering that question today means handing the geometry to a full-wave field solver, and waiting hours or days for a single run. Design verification, not the design itself, is what makes this loop so hard to speed up, and the reason why AI has struggled to accelerate electromagnetic design. Heaviside was built to solve the verification problem. Released in early September, Heaviside-1 is a 350 million parameter model trained on 250,000 3D field simulations spanning 500 billion individual field samples. Given a structure's geometry, materials, and excitation, Heaviside-1 predicts the full 3D electromagnetic field response in milliseconds, roughly 100,000 times faster than a traditional solver, and within a decibel of commercial accuracy. "Heaviside is built to learn electromagnetic fields, the solution to the underlying physics governed by Maxwell's equations, directly," said Michael Frei, Chief Research Officer at Arena Physica. "Electromagneti design has been gated by scarce expertise and slow solvers for decades. We're proud to collaborate with Microsoft to bring Heaviside to Discovery, and accelerate the verification loop for engineering teams building the next generation of hardware." Heaviside fits naturally into Discovery's existing ecosystem with its direct connection to high-performance compute. An agent can move between Heaviside's real-time predictions and a full-fidelity traditional solver when a design requires final validation. Electromagnetic designs, whether an antenna for a defense program or the interconnect layout inside an unreleased chip, can contain sensitive IP. Discovery's governance controls, including audit logging, access controls, and Microsoft 365 integration, are important considerations for enterprise leaders looking to use Heaviside in their design workflows. "AI is accelerating more of the hardware design process, but electromagnetic verification remains a critical bottleneck, particularly for signal integrity, thermal and EM co-design, and high-speed packaging. That's why we're excited to collaborate with Arena Physica and bring Heaviside to Microsoft Discovery," said Preeth Chengappa, Head of Industry, Semi & Physics, Microsoft Discovery. "I've spent decades designing RF and millimeter-wave chips, and the slowest step of the process has always been waiting on electromagnetic simulation," said Harish Krishnaswamy, Chief Scientist at Arena Physica. "Heaviside gives that answer in milliseconds, so engineers can verify their designs almost instantly. I look forward to seeing semiconductor teams on Discovery use that speed for critical work such as advanced packaging and interconnect design." This collaboration opens up a wide range of applications, including strong opportunities in semiconductors. Heaviside can accelerate electromagnetic verification across the structures semiconductor teams design today, including BGA packaging and SerDes interconnects, the signal paths connecting a die to the rest of a system. About Arena Physica Arena Physica is the electromagnetic superintelligence company building Heaviside, the first foundation model for electromagnetism. Founded in 2019 and based in New York City, Arena Physica works with the world's most advanced hardware companies including AMD, Anduril, and Bausch + Lomb. To learn more, visit arenaphysica.com.
SOURCE Arena Physica 
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