Evolution of multilevel voltage source inverters

The problem of increase in power and voltage of inverters today is provided more often by construction of multilevel voltage source inverters. The formation of an Instant curve of voltage of such inverter goes basically by the amplitude modulation with PWM added between the neighboring levels of the voltage of amplitude modulation. The known published English-speaking reviews on multilevel inverters do not cover all variety of circuits of inverters, they do not concern the prehistory of the problem and do not contain references to Russian-speaking publications. The given state-of-the-art review on circuitry of multilevel voltage source inverters, being based on our opportunity of access to the literature, contains the first attempt to capture the designated problem more fully. Besides the regular analysis of known circuits of inverters in the review recent innovative decisions on construction of step-up multilevel voltage source inverters on the basis of systems with switched capacitors are considered.