**6. Conclusions**

In this paper, an advanced circuit-based approach for the static and dynamic electrothermal simulation of multicellular SiC power MOSFETs has been proposed, which—differently from the strategies encountered in the literature—seems to represent a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. The device is discretized into a chosen number of elementary cells (heat sources) and turned into a purely-electrical macrocircuit, where (i) the cells are described with subcircuits accounting for the key and harmful influence of SiC/SiO2 interface traps, and (ii) the power-temperature feedback is modeled with an equivalent thermal network. This network is obtained through a *fully automated* process: first, a 3D mesh representing the device is generated in COMSOL with the support of an *in-house* routine that elaborates the layout files and makes use of further information about thickness of layers, position/shape of the heat sources, material parameters, and boundary conditions; then, such a mesh is provided as an input to the FANTASTIC tool, which derives a dynamic compact thermal model of the device and the related equivalent network. The macrocircuit can be solved in the environment of *any* SPICE-like simulator with short CPU time and unlikely occurrence of convergence issues. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed strategy have been verified on a 1200 V, 50 A multicellular 4H-SiC VDMOS soldered on a DBC package. It has been shown that the simulation of short-circuit and unclamped inductive switching tests requires only 300–400 s on a normal PC, despite the critical conditions and the fine time discretization, and that potentially-dangerous temperature gradients/hogging can be easily identified. It can be concluded that the proposed approach can be helpful for industry engineers who are in charge of optimizing the thermal design of multicellular power devices in *any* technology.

**Author Contributions:** Methodology, V.d.; Software, V.d., L.C., A.P.C., C.S.; Validation, V.d.; Writing–Original Draft Preparation, V.d.; Writing–Review & Editing, V.d.; Supervision, V.d. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The funding for the Ph.D. activity of Ciro Scognamillo was generously donated by the Rinaldi family in the memory of Niccolò Rinaldi, a bright Professor and Researcher of University of Naples Federico II, prematurely passed away in 2018.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
