Cost effective gate drive circuit for MLI with constant number of conducting switches

This paper shows how a seven level MLI can be implemented using lower number of switches using gate drive circuits built with low cost gate drive ICs such as IR2110 family. The technique uses a single dc power supply to feed all the gate drives of an inverter. This type of implementation reduces the total cost of implementation of seven-level MLI and size of driver circuits. Another important feature of this proposed MLI is that the number of conducting switches remains the same during each level. This topology can be extended to a higher number of levels. A laboratory prototype has been developed consisting of single phase seven level MLI with constant number of conducting switches with gate drives and power MOSFETs with three voltage source of 12 V each giving 72 V peak to peak output. The proposed MLI can be used for higher voltage levels by using bootstrap diodes with higher voltage capacity.