*4.4. Pre-Processing Evaluation of N and* ε

During the pre-processing stage, two key parameters have to be chosen, namely, the number of elementary cells *N* (=79, as mentioned in Section 4.1) and the relative error parameter ε, the latter needed for the generation of the equivalent thermal network with FANTASTIC and set to 10−3. For the particular component under test, this discretization and this error were found to be a good trade-off between accuracy and CPU time needed for the ET simulation, as evaluated in an additional pre-processing analysis where some *N* and ε values were tested; considering much higher *N* and/or much lower ε leads to a marginal accuracy improvement paid with a significant increase in CPU time.
