ETO light multilevel converters for large electric vehicle and hybrid electric vehicle drives

Multilevel converters are very popular for high power AC drives to meet the power demands for large electric/hybrid electric vehicles. Emitter Turn-off (ETO) thyristor is one of the present state-of-the-art high power semiconductor devices. The newest version of ETO (Gen-4 ETO) is more intelligent and reliable. Packed with advanced features as well as superior performance, ETO device and ETO-based power converters are very attractive for large electric drives. This paper presents the ETO light neutral-point-clamped (NPC) converter design and thermal analysis. The modular digital controller architecture for this converter is proposed in order to improve the system reliability and increase its expansion flexibility. As a solution to further increase the converter output power, the ETO light active NPC (ANPC) converter is presented, and moreover its fault tolerant capability is discussed.