Control of a low voltage ac/dc/ac converter for high-speed induction machine drive applications has been investigated. Such a configuration can be applied, for example, in microturbines and high-speed spindles. Scalar control is usually applied for the control of high-speed drives especially in the case of very high-speed drives. Indirect rotor-flux-oriented control and direct torque control are designed and compared for the control of an exemplary high-speed induction machine drive. The 2L VSC is the most widely applied converter for high-speed drives. However, the 3L-NPC VSC is an attractive topology if drastically increased switching frequencies are required. A detailed comparison between a 2L VSC and a 3L-NPC VSC as the machine side converter of the exemplary high-speed induction machine drive is carried out. Voltage-oriented control is applied for the control of the grid side PWM active front end converter. In several industrial applications PWM active front end converters commonly operate in parallel to thyristor converter fed dc drives. Behavior of the voltage-oriented controlled active front end converter with L-filter in the presence of a parallel thyristor converter is investigated. The design of the LCL-filter components according to the given maximum grid current harmonics (e.g. IEEE-519) is a complex task. So far a precise and clear design procedure has not been presented. A new procedure to design the grid side filter (L- and LCL-filter) is proposed using the analytical expression of the converter voltage harmonics based on Bessel functions to achieve the compliance with the grid standard of IEEE-519. Voltage-oriented control with active damping is used to control the active front end converter with LCL-filter. A simple method is proposed to design the required lead-lag compensator in the active damping loop.