Disturbance observer (DOB) has been studied extensively and applied to many motion control fields during the last decades, but relatively few studies have been devoted to the development of analytic, systematic design methods for DOB itself, This paper thus aims to provide an analytic, systematic design method for DOB. To do this, DOB is structurally analyzed and the generalized disturbance compensation framework named robust internal-loop compensator (RIC) is introduced. Through this, the inherent equivalence between DOB and RIC is found, and the mixed sensitivity optimization problem of DOB is solved. Q-filter design is completely separated from the mixed sensitivity optimization problems of DOB although the proposed method has implicit .elation with Q-filter. Also, although the Q-fille. is separately designed with sensitivity function, the proposed DOB framework has the exactly same characteristic as the original DOB.