Very nice read. I wonder, have you also investigated the coupling of thermal and electrical systems in these simulations using reduced order multirate techniques?
It was brought to our attention that it would be interesting to have a good interface for ROM models. It seems like POD-based dimensional reduction is widely used in the industry.
On the other hand, PLECS does have clever way to simulate thermal losses from ideal switch models:
Since simulation with standard PLECS ideal switches is so much more efficient than SPICE, it allows validation of thermal behavior at system-level.
But PLECS Spice does come in the picture here. What the above technique needs is a LUT table (XML) for the losses, and this can be extracted from SPICE. Now that PLECS Spice is part of PLECS, you can do it in the same tool. The idea is to prepare a simulated test bench for a double pulse test with the detailed SPICE model provided on the semiconductor manufacturer's website.
Then, you can use the data sheet impedance data (or generate the step-response curve yourself from experiment, the finite-elements method, etc) and fit an RC thermal network to it. I built a python tool for that available here:
I wish I had a little more time to improve on the API, but I think it's very convenient. It is also possible to fit impedance data directly in PLECS. Cross-talk for spacial coupling can also be modeled there using similar strategy. The end result is a high accuracy thermal simulation at system-level.
There are some limitations to the approach, and if a full bi-directional coupling is needed (where the energy is taken out of the analog system) you can get more complex behavior by staying within PLECS Spice and modeling the thermal behavior there. It is slower though.
