This paper presents a novel fault tolerant operation strategy for three-level active neutral point clamped (3L-ANPC) inverter fed permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drives. Firstly, a thyristor connecting the mid-point of dc-bus voltage and the common-point of bi-directional switches is applied to reconstruct 3L-ANPC inverter topology under fault conditions, thereby avoiding unbalanced neutral-point voltage influence and increasing maximum modulation index. Furthermore, to enhance the PMSM performance, a virtual vector synthesis method is proposed, which also simplifies the duty-cycle calculation of remaining voltage vectors. Simulation results has verified the effectiveness of the proposed More details and experimental results will be presented in the full manuscript.