permnoob:
so I am thinking I may put the chips in a seperate enclousure mounted directly to the motors w/ ultrfast recovery diodes on nice short leads and run the PWM control logic over the long distance, rather than power, to keep noise in check.
Mounting near motor sounds good - but be careful with ground noise issues.
The devices already have fast recovery diodes built in as its a MOSFET half bridge surely? You might want to augment with power shottky rectifiers to reduce freewheel losses though. Transient suppression diode(s) and decoupling can all be in the enclosure too?