The popular linear PID controller is mostly effective for linear or nearly linear control problems. Nonlinear PID controllers, however, are needed in order to satisfactorily control (highly) nonlinear plants, time-varying plants, or plants with significant time delay. This paper extends our previous papers in which we show rigorously that some fuzzy controllers are actually nonlinear PI, PD, and PID controllers with variable gains that can outperform their linear counterparts. In the present paper, we study the analytical structure of an important class of two- and three-dimensional fuzzy controllers. We link the entire class, as opposed to one controller at a time, to nonlinear PI, PD, and PID controllers with variable gains by establishing the conditions for the former to structurally become the latter. Unlike the results in the literature, which are exclusively for the fuzzy controllers using linear fuzzy sets for the input variables, this class of fuzzy controllers employs nonlinear input fuzzy sets of arbitrary types. Our structural results are thus more general and contain the existing ones as special cases. Two concrete examples are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the new results. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.