The need for efficiency, reliability and continuous operation has lead over the years to the development of fault-tolerant electrical drives for various industrial purposes and for transport applications. Permanent-magnet synchronous machines have also been gaining interest due to their high torque-to-mass ratio and high efficiency, which make them a very good candidate to reduce the weight and volume of the equipment. In this work, a multidisciplinary approach for the design of fault-tolerant permanent-magnet synchronous machine drives is presented. The first chapter introduces the electrical drive and its components. An analysis of the failures and key elements to quantify the reliability are given. A general drive model for multi-phase machines is described in chapter 2, whereas the control aspects are addressed in chapter 3. Chapter 4 is dedicated to fault detection and isolation, which is the basis used for fault-tolerant control (chapter 5). Some design considerations are exposed in the sixth chapter. Finally, conclusions and future works are proposed in the last chapter of this treatise.