despite many advantageous features of interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (ipmsm), the precise speed control of an ipmsm drive becomes a complex issue due to nonlinear coupling among its winding currents and the rotor speed as well as the nonlinearity present in the electromagnetic developed torque due to magnetic saturation of the rotor core particularly, at high speeds (above rated speed). fast and accurate response, quick recovery of speed from any disturbances and insensitivity to parameter variations are some of the important characteristics of high performance drive system used in robotics, rolling mills, traction and spindle drives. the conventional controllers such as pi, pid are sensitive to plant parameter variations and load disturbance. for the purpose of obtaining high dynamic performance, recently researchers developed several non-linear as well as intelligent controllers. most of the reported works on controller design of ipmsm took an assumption of d-axis stator current (i[subscript d]) equal to zero in order to simplify the development of the controller. however, with this assumption it is not possible to control the motor above the rated speed and the reluctance torque of ipmsm can not be utilized efficiently. furthermore, this assumption leads to an erroneous result for motor at all operating conditions. in this thesis, some controllers are developed for the ipmsm drive system incorporating the flux-weakening technique in order to control the motor above the rated speed. a detailed analysis of the flux control based on various operating regions is also provided in this thesis. in order to get the optimum efficiency, an adaptive backstepping based nonlinear control scheme incorporating flux control for an ipm synchronous motor drive is taken into account at the design stage of the controller. thus, the proposed adaptive nonlinear backstepping controller is capable of conserving the system robustness and stability against all mechanical parameters variation and external load torque disturbance. to ensure stability the controller is designed based on lyapunov's stability theory. a novel fuzzy logic controller (flc) including both torque and flux control is also developed in this work. the proposed flc overcomes the unknown and nonlinear uncertainties of the drive and controls the motor over a wide speed range. for further improvement of the flc structure, the membership function of the controller is tuned online. an integral part of this work is directed to develop an adaptive-network based fuzzy interference system (anfis) based neuro fuzzy logic controller. in this work, an adaptive tuning algorithm is also developed to adjust the membership function and consequent parameters. in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ipmsm drive, at first simulation model is developed using matlab/simulink. then the complete ipmsm drive incorporating various control algorithms have been successfully implemented using digital signal processor (dsp) controller board-dsi104 for a laboratory 5 hp motor. the effectiveness of the proposed drive is verified both in simulation and experiment at different operating conditions. the results show the robustness of the drive and it's potentiality to apply for real-time industrial drive application. this thesis also provides through knowledge about development and various speed real-time applications of controllers for ipmsm drive, which will be useful for researchers and practicing engineers.