Solar power inverters

This paper reviews the history of solar power inverters and highlights aspects of power electronic packaging concerning functional and packaging integration in solar inverter technology. The most important indicators to characterize the advances in inverter technology are efficiency and losses respectively, mean time between failure and inverter costs. A high integration level is bounded up with high reliability and life time and less costs. The paper presents the state of the art and trends in the inverter design towards higher functional and packaging integration. Several generations of medium power inverter are analyzed concerning integration level which will be described by different indicators.