In this paper, a novel single stage inverter for metal halide (abbr. MH) lamps has been proposed, which integrates two power stages of DC/DC and DC/AC to one stage of DC/AC inverter. The main contributions as the following; (1) A new topologies for electronic ballast have been put forward and its principle has been investigated; (2) A controlling strategy for new circuit has been presented. (3) The principle of ZVS has been developed; (4) The simulative results show that the new circuit has some special performances. A prototype of output power 200W has been made up and the efficiency is about 95%. The experimental results are agreed with the theoretic results and simulative results and also show that the new circuit has many merits such as lower cost, low EMI, high efficiency and so on.