Recommended EMC simulation tools and techniques?

What's your budget for this ?

I haven't seen any prices but I would guess you will be  into very serious money indeed.

On of the problems with these "mega tools" is that you need engineers who do nothing else to work them.

I expect that the one (referenced in your link) that does field solving for lightning strikes on aircraft will be in that class.

What kind of boards are you designing ?

MK

Hi Michael, yes it seems likely that it'll be pricey. Usually we design low power embedded systems with various connectivity options, but every now and then an FPGA project and/or high current industrial controllers pops up.

Not sure what budget it needs. I'm guessing for something like CST Studio it'll be no less than 3 or 4k.

My guess is multiply that by 10 or 20 !

Googling (although there is very little hard pricing info on the web) seems to confirm my estimate -

MK

Check openEMS, maybe it's not the most powerful tool but you can achieve some results.

Another option, it's renting CPU time with FEKO, crunchyard.

Wow, I expected Ansys packages to have a hefty price, but didn't think it'll be in that range!!!!

Carlos thanks a lot, I didn't know about this option. At a first glance, I will need to study the options and invest a little bit of time to learn which tool to spend a lot of time learning!!!

Michael's comment makes a lot of sense, if we were to invest a lot in a tool we need to get our money's worth and have an engineer constantly making use of it.

Renting time to use FEKO seems the reasonable thing to do.

I guess you can ask for a free trial of FEKO to learn the basics and then you can go for the renting option.