In this paper, a six-switch AC/DC/AC converter is proposed for single-phase wind energy system application. The proposed converter consists of two arms with three switches in each, where the top layer switches are used for the rectification mode and lower layer switches are used for the inversion mode of operation. The middle layer switches are shared by the both rectification and inversion mode operation based on the modified PWM scheme. A small rated DC link capacitor is chosen by providing suitable coordination control and EX-OR gate logic between the rectification and inversion mode of operation. The proposed single-phase six-switch converter has the advantage of both reduced number of switches and small DC link capacitor size. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed converter, simulation results are presented for 1, kW wind system. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.