The popularity of electric vehicles has soared in recent years, with projections forecasting continued growth. Similarly, the advent of artificial intelligence has led to an exponential rise in data center power requirements. Both of these sectors require next-generation, high-performance power conver sion architectures to keep up with the rapid pace of development. The flying capacitor multilevel converter (FCML) has shown par ticular promise in DC/AC and AC/DC conversion applications. In this work, a comprehensive procedure is presented to optimize every aspect of FCML converter design. This approach is utilized to develop a 600 V, 6.6 kW hardware prototype which achieves 800 kW/L volumetric and 250 kW/kg gravimetric power density respectively, the highest values reported to date.
