In this work an on-line dead-time compensation method based on a time delay control for a pulse-modulation (PM) synchronous motor drive is presented. Disturbance voltages caused by the dead time are estimated on-line without any additional circuits nor off-line experimental measurements. The estimated disturbance, voltages are fed back to the voltage reference as compensation. The proposed method is applied to a PM synchronous motor drive system and implemented using a DSP TMS320C31. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.