Recently, permanent magnet synchronous motors are applied to various applications such as electric vehicle, aerospace, medical service, and military applications due to several outstanding characteristics. Because of the importance of high reliable operation in these areas, many researches which are related to the fault detection and diagnosis of inverter systems are conducted. In this paper, a new simple fault detection method of voltage source inverter for permanent magnet synchronous motor is proposed. The feasibility of the proposed method is proved by simulation and experiment. By the simulation and experiments, rapid detection characteristic of the proposed method has been proved without any additional voltage sensor. Index Terms-fault detection, FDD, voltage source inverter, switch open fault 3175 978-1-4244-2893-9/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE