## 1 Introduction  
The half-bridge, as a basic unit, employs two stacked semiconductor switches connected across the DC voltage to realize energy transfer. In AC-DC or DC-AC applications, most of the converters consist of the half-bridge, such as the full-bridge converter and three-phase converter. The two switches in a half-bridge are complementarily conducted. Due to turn-on and turn-off delays and finite rise-time and fall-time during the commutation, a dead-time is inserted between the turn-on and the turn-off of the switches to avoid short circuiting. This results in a current-dependent switching node voltage during the dead-time, which increases the output distortion. To date, extensive studies have focused on the problem of dead-time effect. Most of the compensation and elimination methods can be divided into three categories: the pulse-based compensation [1; 2], the voltage feedforward compensation [3; 4] and the dead-time elimination [5; 6; 7]. For the pulse-based compensation method, the dead-time effect is modeled as a pulse shift error. A dead-time width pulse is added or reduced based on the shift error to compensate the dead-time effect [1; 2]. For the voltage feedforward compensation, the dead-time effect is modeled as an average voltage error, which is regarded as a disturbance to the output voltage. The voltage error is added to the reference voltage directly to compensate the dead-time effect [3; 4]. For the dead-time elimination method, the driving signal is only put on one switch, whereas the driving signal of the other switch is removed. The body diode conducts the current. Therefore, the dead-time is not required in this method [5; 6; 7]. Theoretically, these three methods can fully compensate or eliminate the dead-time effect. In practice, however, the results depend on the detection precision of the output current polarity. Due to the output current ripple and zero current clamping, the output current polarity is difficult to detect accurately. Moreover, beyond the three methods, some other methods employing proper current control are proposed to solve the problem of dead-time effect [8; 9; 10; 11]. However, these techniques are still not capable of completely removing the dead-time effect. In the half-bridge circuits, the voltage and current transitions can be turn-off controlled or turn-on controlled, which is influenced by the output current polarity. The turn-off controlled type refers to the case that the commutation is triggered by the turn-off of the switches. Thus, the body diodes of the next turn-on switches are conducted during the dead-time, whereas the turn-on controlled type refers to the case that the commutation is triggered by the turn-on of the switches. Different commutation type leads to different voltage error caused by the dead-time. This kind of dead-time effect is blanking delay error, which is the main error in the half-bridge-based topology [12]. Essentially, the commutation type, which is related to the output current polarity, makes the dead-time effect difficult to remove completely. Zero-voltage-switching (ZVT) soft-switching technique can be used to eliminate the blanking delay error, although the technique aims to reduce the switching loss and improve the efficiency. The transitions are all turn-off controlled in the ZVT soft-switching converters with the conduction of the anti-parallel diode during the dead-time, which is irrelevant to the output current. Therefore, the dead-time effect of blanking delay error can be completely removed by using the ZVT soft-switching technique. Until now, several topologies of the ZVT pulse-width-modulation (PWM) inverters have been proposed. The auxiliary resonant commutated pole inverter (ARCPI) has been proposed with two auxiliary switches per phase [13; 14]. The ARCPI can meet the demand for high efficiency, as well as low voltage and current stresses. However, the major drawback is the existence of the split capacitors, which causes capacitor charge unbalance.