Power generation using a photovoltaic (PV) system involves two stages of conversion namely, a DC to DC converter to step up the low voltage obtained from the PV array and an inverter to convert the boosted DC voltage into AC. A Zsource inverter does both inversion and boost up operation using a single stage with reduced number of components, complexity and also cost. An impedance network consisting of two inductors and two capacitors connected in a unique way couples the main inverter circuit with the PV source thus providing a way to boost up the DC voltage. This paper presents the simulation of a PV fed Z-source inverter connected to a standalone load. A simple boost PWM control method is adopted to generate switching pulses for the Zsource inverter. A passive LC filter is suitably designed to improve the waveform quality obtained from the Z-source inverter. The switching pulses generated using VHDL coding for Field Programmed Gate Array implemntation is presented in ModelSim environment. Further the paper evaluates the total harmonic distortion of the PV fed Z-source inverter without and with LC filter. It is seen that with a passive LC filter, the power quality of the PV fed Z-source inverter is highly improved. Results are verified using simulations in MATLAB-SIMULINK environment. © 2015, Research India Publications. All rights reserved.