In this paper, we propose a generalized method to design sliding hyperplane for variable structure control in the discrete time domain. The well-known Lyapunov inequality of full order will be used for generating the {it stable} sliding hyperplanes without loss of generality, which shows the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of stable sliding hyperplane for multi-input-multi-output systems. Also, we derive a desirable reaching law that guarantees the attractiveness of the boundary layer. Then, it will be shown that the results (obtained with full state feedback information) can be generalized for the discrete time output feedback case by adopting multi-rate output feedback (MROF). Copyright © 2007 International Federation of Automatic Control All Rights Reserved.