This paper presents a design strategy for the control of the Z-source inverter (ZSI). For the Z-network capacitor voltage control, the average current model is derived to describe the dynamics of the voltage control and the controller outputs the average current command for the capacitor. Z-network inductor current reference is derived from the average current model of the Z-network capacitor. The inner current control loop outputs the average voltage command for the Z-network inductor and the shoot-through duty ratio of the ZSI is calculated from the output using the average voltage model of the Z-network inductor. The gain values of the current and voltage controllers are directly obtained by the Z-network parameters and desired bandwidth of each controller without a gain tuning process.