A feedforword-cascade water cooling control system is presented to meet the requirements of a projection lens in a high-resolution optical lithography for the fast convergence and high performance temperature control. The system takes an objective as the primary control object and the cooling water as a secondary control object. According to the slow dynamic temperature response characteristics of the projection lens, model predictive control is adopted as the outer loop main control algorithm. On the basis of the large time-delay problems of a cooling water circuit, the PID control with a Smith predictor is used as the inner loop auxiliary control algorithm. To overcome the serious disturbance in optical lithography at different operating status, the feedforward compensation is introduced to control the laser thermal interference. Finally, the temperature control experiment for the objective is simulated under the conditions of different control structures and thermal interferences. The results show that the stable-state error curve of the objective is in the ±0.01 ℃. The control experimental results demonstrate that the method has fast convergence and strong anti-interference, and meets the requirements of the projection lens for ultra-precision temperature control.