Conference Agenda

In the past decades, multilevel converters have evolved from ‘new’ to ‘established’ with industrial products in all power decades from 1W to 10MW.

Choosing the best semiconductor has thus become more and more difficult because the choice is not guided by the voltage and current to handle: devices with a reduced voltage rating or with a reduced current rating can be respectively connected in series or parallel to build multilevel converters with improved performances: better efficiency, higher power density and/or reduced cost.

To help designers make the right decision, specific methods can be used and design tools have been developed. They rely on a unified formalism for series-, parallel- and series-parallel- multilevel converters to allow analytic models for pre-design, and to build unified simulation models for easy comparison of waveforms, efficiency and 1st-order estimate of weight and size of the main components.

In this talk, design tools of different levels of complexity and accuracy that can be used to aid the designer at different stages of the design process will be presented. In particular it will be shown that existing simulation softwares can be turned into pre-design tool providing fast insight of tradeoffs, existing open-source initiatives will be highlighted and some available commercial tools for the design of converters will be briefly presented.