This paper presents a sliding mode observer for the sensorless control of interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) drives. The sliding mode observer has been presented as a robust estimation method. Most of these previous works, however, were not for an interior PMSM (IPMSM), but for a non-salient pole PMSM and its observer design is conducted in the stationary reference frame. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the design of a sliding mode observer and its driving characteristics for an IPMSM. The proposed sliding mode observer is designed in the rotating reference frame, and good drive performance is achieved even when the observer parameters are mismatched with those of an actual motor. The proposed method is applied to a 600W IPMSM, and, then, the measurement results are presented.