Abstract: In a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) drive system, the disturbance voltage is caused by inverter nonlinearities including dead time, on-state voltage drops, and switch on/off delay etc, which will lead to torque ripples, distortions of output voltages, phase currents, etc. In order to overcome these issues, a method of directly extracting and compensating the inverter nonlinearity was proposed. Firstly, the voltage distortion due to inverter nonlinearity was extracted directly through a harmonic separation scheme. Afterwards, the disturbance voltage can be online compensated by a proposed feedback controller. The proposed method is irrespective of machine parameters and does not need other hardware devices, and can be applied to both i_d=0 and maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) controls. The proposed method was finally verified on a prototype surface-mounted PMSM and an interior PMSM, respectively. The experimental results manifest that the proposed method can effectively suppress the disturbance voltage due to the inverter nonlinearity and has excellent steady-state and dynamic performances.