Control systems with backlash at the input are considered in this paper. The goal of this work is to characterize the attractor of such nonlinear dynamical systems, and to design anti-windup inspired loops such that the system is globally asymptotically stable with respect to this attractor. The anti-windup loops affect the dynamics of the controllers, and allow to increase the performance of the closed-loop systems. Different performance issues are considered throughout the paper such as robustness with respect to uncertainty in the backlash, and L 2 gain when external disturbances affect the dynamics. Numerically tractable algorithms with feasibility guarantee are provided, as soon as the linear closed-loop system, obtained by neglecting the backlash effect, is asymptotically stable. The results are illustrated on an academic example and an open-loop unstable aircraft system.