Selective harmonic elimination has been a widely researched alternative to traditional PWM techniques. This paper presents the selective harmonic elimination of a new family of multilevel inverters using genetic algorithms. The new topology has the advantage of a reduced number of devices compared to traditional configurations and can be extended to any number of levels. The presented system reduces both the implementation complexity and the computational time. The GA technique finds the optimal solution set of switching angles, if it exists, for each required harmonic profile. Both simulation results and experimental verification of the proposed inverter topology for different numbers of levels and different harmonic profiles are presented. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.