This paper focuses on designing a disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) system for PMSM drives. The cascade structure of the discrete-time PI-PI control system with tracking anti-windup scheme based on back-calculation algorithm has been designed for both loops. In this study, the high-order disturbance observer (HODO) based control has been proposed to improve the speed tracking performance of the control system for PMSMs. Note that the disturbance in the mechanical dynamics includes not only the load torque but also the torque losses resulting from the time-varying flux, hysteresis, and friction. The HODO observer is designed to estimate this total disturbance. Moreover, the proposed disturbance observer does not require the derivatives of the disturbance to be zero, like in the traditional ones. The proposed DOBC demonstrates its ability to improve speed tracking performance regardless of a load torque variation and the high-order disturbances caused by a cogging torque and a high-frequency electromagnetic noise in the PMSM system. The proposed disturbance observer-based control system has been implemented with a Lucas-Nuelle 300 W PMSM prototyping kit. In real-time experiments, the proposed algorithm with HODO achieves fewer speed errors and faster response comparing with the PI controller without HODO or PI controller with HODO of lower orders. The synthesis of the disturbance observer with discrete-time PI controller with the effective tractive anti-windup scheme has practical significance because it is widely used in the industry. The experimental results have proved the feasibility of the proposed control scheme.INDEX TERMS Anti-windup, disturbance observer based control, high-order disturbance observer, discrete-timePI controller, PMSM, back-calculation algorithm.