ABSTRACT:
Multilevel voltage source inverter (VSI) structure has been recognized to be very popular especially in
high power applications. The general concept of multilevel inverter is to synthesize a sinusoidal voltage
from several levels of voltages. By having two or more level of voltages to build sinusoidal voltage, the
voltage stress on the switching devices is reduced and the output harmonics distortion is minimized. It is
reported that the development of multilevel VSI topology has began in early 1980’s when Nabae at el
proposed a three-level Neutral Point Clamped (NPC). Since then, several multilevel topologies have
evolved. Presently, there is a number of topologies that can be found in literature and the common
topologies are Diode Clamp Multilevel Inverter (DCMI) also known as Neutral Point Clamp (NPC), Flying
Capacitor Multilevel Inverter (FCMI) and Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (CMI)[