For mass production of printed electronics in roll-to-roll fashion, precision tension control is important to reduce register errors. Register error should be minimized within several to tens of microns for many electronic devices to be manufactured through printing technology. In order to achieve this goal, tension disturbance must be attenuated before printing process within a certain range. In this paper, a certain tension range which allows maintaining register error within 10 micron was defined with specific operating conditions. A LQG controller was proposed instead of the conventional PI controller for precision tension control using a multivariable feedback. A guideline to determine design parameters for calculating LQ gain was proposed. The proposed LQG controller was compared to both PI controller and LQ regulator with white noise by numerical simulations. Results showed that the proposed LQG controller was effective for attenuating tension disturbance with white noise.
