Abstract: We study the problem of stabilization and controller design for a class of continuous-time Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems.On the basis of the fuzzy Lyapunov approach and parallel distributed compensation (PDC) scheme, we derive a novel stabilization condition in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) by further exploring the properties of the time derivatives of premise membership functions and introducing more slack matrix variables.We also provide a design procedure for the responding controller.The proposed approach decouples the Lyapunov matrices from the system matrices and fully considers the properties of the time derivatives of the premise membership functions, thereby providing more freedom to the LMI problems.Numeric examples demonstrate that the novel stabilization condition enlarges the stabilization regions of the system, reduces conservatism, and ensures that the designed controller has a smaller degree of disturbance attenuation, thereby improving the performance of the system.