Nonlinear time-varying systems exist widely in practice. Therefore, it is of great theoretical importance and practical value to investigate the problem of controlling such systems. However, the results available in developing adaptive control to address such a problem are still limited. Especially a majority of them are restricted to be slowly time-varying linear systems. This paper presents a modular-based adaptive control scheme for parametric strict feedback nonlinear time-varying systems. The parameters considered include both continuous and piecewise time-varying parameters, and they are not necessarily restricted to be slowly time-varying or infrequent jumping. The technique of adaptive backstepping with nonlinear damping is employed in the control design module, while the parameter projection algorithm is performed on the parameter estimation module. It is proved that the uniform boundedness of all closed-loop system signals can be guaranteed with the proposed control scheme. The performance of the tracking error in the mean square sense with respect to the parameter variation rate is also established. Furthermore, perfect asymptotically tracking can be achieved when the varying rates of unknown parameters are in the L 2 space.A few adaptive nonlinear control design tools described in [7] and [8] have been applied to LTV systems [9] [10,11] and nonlinear time-varying systems [12,13]. Although these existing results achieve stability and improve performance, they are mainly dependent upon integrator backstepping method with tuning function and Kreisselmeier/Marino&Tomei (K/MT) filters; on the other hand, they also require the time variations of the parameters to be either sufficiently slow or infrequent jumps. Namely, the rate of parameter variations is constrained by a sufficiently small upper bound.In this paper, on the basis of our recent preliminary work in [14], we further address the issue of controlling uncertain nonlinear time-varying systems by utilizing the modular-based adaptive control scheme in which the controller module and the parameter identifier module are designed separately, which is different from the tuning function approach adopted in [9], [15], [16,17], and [18] and the output feedback approach in [19] and [20]. More importantly, the usual restrictive parameter assumption of sufficiently slow time variations and infrequent jumps is removed. This implies that the variation rates of unknown continuous time-varying parameters can be bounded by arbitrary constants while piecewise time-varying parameters are allowed to jump with any finite frequencies and they are not limited to be piecewise constant like in [14]. Actually, there is no result available to control nonlinear systems with discontinuous piecewise time-varying parameters. It is shown that the proposed scheme can ensure the uniform boundedness of all the closed-loop system signals. A relationship between the tracking error and the rates of parameter variations is also established. It is shown that the slower the time variation...