A correction to the state-machine-decoder for Stacked Multicell converters

Natural capacitor voltage balancing for Flying Capacitor and Stacked Multicell converters require uniform distribution of switching transitions among cells. The state-machine-decoder has been known as the optimal technique to achieve this goal. In this paper, however, it is shown that the conventional state-machine-decoder may not generate the optimal balancing scheme for Stacked Multicell converters. The reason behind the suboptimal distribution is investigated and a correction to the state-machine-decoder is proposed to achieve the optimal distribution. Simulation results are included to support the proposed correction.