Silicon carbide vertical MESFET devices are well suited for high speed and high power electronic devices. In this work we have optimized the geometry of vertical MESFETs for microwave applications, using iterative two-dimensional simulations. Relevant parasitics are included in the simulations to investigate the performance of realistic devices. The state of the art device has f(T)=7 GHz and we show that vertical MESFETs fabricated with traditional technology are totally limited by parasitics. Two different approaches to reduce the parasitics in the vertical MESFET are proposed where f(T) increases significantly. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.