  A brief summary of direct solution approaches for finite element methods
(FEM) in computational electromagnetics (CEM) is given along with an
alternative direct solution based on domain decomposition (DD). Unlike recent
trends in approximate/low-rank solvers, this work focuses on `numerically
exact' solution methods as they are more reliable for complex `real-life'
models. Preliminary studies on general three dimensional geometries with
unstructured FEM meshes suggest that the proposed direct DD methodology offers
significant memory advantages over highly optimized, high-performance sparse
direct solver libraries, while maintaining approximately comparable or slightly
slower serial serial execution speed but with significantly better parallel and
GPU processing prospects.
