A new composite control method for a carriage balancing single inverted pendulum system is proposed and applied to swing up the pendulum and to stabilize it under the state constraint. The target inverted pendulum system has an extremely limited length of the cart(below 16cm). The proposed swing-up controller comprises a sliding mode control algorithm and an optimal control algorithm based on two regions: the region near the inverted unstable equilibrium position and the rest of the state space including the downward stable equilibrium position. The sliding mode controller uses a switching control action to converge along the specified path(hyperplane) derived from energy equation from a state around the path to desired state(standing position). An optimal control method is also used to guarantee the stability at unstable equilibrium position. Compared with the reported controllers, it is simpler and easier to implement. Experimental results are given to show the effectiveness of this controller.