ABSTRACT
Multilevel inverters represent a novel method of constructing DC/AC inverters. This idea was published by Nabae in 1980 in an IEEE international conference IEEE APEC’80, and the same idea was published in 1981 in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications. Actually, multilevel inverters represent a different technique from the PWM method, which consists of vertically chopping a reference waveform to achieve a similar output waveform (e.g., sine wave). The multilevel inverting technique consists of accumulating the levels horizontally to achieve the waveform (e.g., sine wave). The soft-switching technique was implemented in DC/DC conversion in the 1980s. We would like to introduce this technique in DC/AC inverters as well, in the current chapter.
