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In this paper, a new single-phase cascaded multilevel inverter based on novel H-bridge units is proposed. In order to generate all voltage levels (even and odd) at the output, nine different algorithms are proposed to determine the magnitudes of dc voltage sources. Then, the proposed algorithms are compared to investigate their advantages and disadvantages. This topology is able to increase the number of output voltage levels by using a lower number of power electronic devices such as switches, power diodes, driver circuits, and dc voltage sources that lead to reduction in installation space and cost of the inverter. In addition, in the proposed cascaded multilevel inverter, not only the number of required power electronic devices is reduced, but also the amount of the blocked voltage by switches, and the number of different voltage amplitudes of the used sources is decreased. These features are some of the most important advantages of the proposed topology. These features are obtained via the comparison of the proposed topology and its proposed algorithms with the conventional cascaded multilevel inverters that have been presented in the literatures. The operation and performances of the proposed topology with its presented algorithms in generating all voltage levels have been verified by using the experimental results of a 49-level single-phase inverter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]