A novel hybrid diode-clamp cascade multilevel converter (HDCMC) is presented in this paper. The new concept of the converter is based on connection of multiple diode-clamp converter modules with different dc bus voltages. Normally, the voltage blocking capability of faster devices such as IGBT and the switching speed of high voltage devices like GTO are found to be limited. With the novel topology consisting of higher voltage modules and lower voltage modules, realization of multilevel converters using a hy...