A multiphase space-vector pulse-width modulation (SVPWM) with switching states selected based on reference order is proposed. The immediate advantages include the great reduction of computational complexity and simple extension to arbitrary prime phase numbers. In the first part, the general switching strategy is derived considering pure sinusoidal references. Though the derived method is based on adjacent space-vector selection, unlike the conventional method, it needs not any information of sector number. Further, the duty ratio can be obtained from the N-phase reference directly without any information of selected switching states. The second part shows that the strategy is applicable to multi-frequency references. By comparing the proposed SVPWM with carrier-based PWM, the implementation of SVPWM becomes quite simple. In simulations and experiments, five different references are applied and the results verify the accuracy of the proposed modulator.