When compared with other five-level symmetric topologies such as flying capacitor multilevel converters or cascade cell multilevel converters, the cascade asymmetric multilevel converter has reduced the switching states to one-half and also the number of capacitors or diodes. Moreover, it presents no problem to balance the capacitors voltage. Based on a five-level cascaded asymmetric multilevel converter topology, PSPWM strategy is used to calculate values of the DC bus capacitors and flying capacitors. The result of simulation represents that switching functions are simple and easy to control; the bus capacitor voltage is basically stable and able to achieve self-balancing. It can be very effective in reducing the output of the harmonic component and improve the utilization of capacitors when select the appropriate capacitance value.
