With the development of high voltage technology ,the inverter power is becoming higher and higher . The traditional two-level inverter capacity has been difficult to achieve high power requirements due to the limitation of the power electronic devices. Therefore, different new kinds of multilevel inverter topologies with high-performance are proposed by the scientist all over the world. This paper introduces the topology structure, characteristics and working principle of threelevel inverter, and makes a detailed description of space vector pulse width modulation principle. Finally, the simulation waveforms are presented with Matlab/Simulink, the results verifies the validity of the theoretical analysis.