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Guest Editors: Yang Yang, Atif Shamim, Wonbin Hong, Yang Hao, Eva Rajo-Iglesias, Manos M. Tentzeris
Submission deadline: 31 October 2026
Guest Editors: John L. Volakis, Sembiam R. Rengarajan, Christos G. Christodoulou, Ahmad Hoorfar, Filippo Costa, Grzegorz Bogdan
Submission deadline: 31 January 2027
Details of each Special Issue are given below.
Emerging Materials and Enabling Technologies for Advancing Antenna Systems: From Design to Manufacturing
In recent years, novel materials, processes, and manufacturing technologies have emerged with significant potential for advancing antenna systems in wireless communication. Over the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in new microwave materials and fabrication methods, which facilitate the development and innovation of antennas, metasurfaces, and metamaterials across the megahertz (MHz) to terahertz (THz) frequency range. However, there is no such special issue in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (TAP). To address this gap, a Special Issue on New Materials and Processing Technologies for Antenna Designs and Wireless Communication is necessary, offering an excellent platform for cross-disciplinary researchers and practitioners to share the latest developments in antenna designs inspired by advanced materials and emerging manufacturing technologies. The Special Issue will also provide a forward-looking perspective on future antenna designs that leverage advanced materials and intelligent manufacturing technologies to address the integration of emerging wireless paradigms (such as 6G, IoT, and electromagnetic skins), sustainability and green fabrication, and the increasing impact of AI-driven design and optimization.
The scope of this TAP Special Issue covers emerging RF/microwave materials and fabrication processes with significant potential to advance future developments in antenna innovations, propagation, and electromagnetic wave manipulation, utilizing high-performance RF materials and processing technologies. This interdisciplinary field unites researchers, scientists, and engineers from diverse backgrounds to promote and explore novel materials, processes, and manufacturing techniques. It also offers opportunities for the AP-S community to share cross-disciplinary R&D efforts and findings. Submissions may encompass, but are not limited to material engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, automation, and process engineering.
Topics of interest: We invite high-quality submissions addressing topics including, but not limited to:
- Additively Manufactured Antennas and Arrays:
- Additive Manufacturing techniques for antenna fabrications, such as inkjet and screen printing, fused deposition modelling (FDM), continuous liquid interface production (CLIP), and selective laser sintering (SLS), etc.
- Dielectric materials for antenna designs: Low-loss materials, high dielectric constant materials, phase-changing materials
- Metallic materials for antenna designs: steel, silver, copper, and alloys
- Multimaterial 3D printing, e.g. dielectric and conductive materials
- Bioprinting for nanoantennas
- Emerging Fabrication and Processing Techniques for Antennas:
- Intelligent antenna manufacturing systems with AI
- Ultra-precision machining: laser micromachining and electro-discharge machining (EDM) with improved accuracy for prototyping nano antennas or photonic conductive antennas (PCA)
- Hybrid manufacturing for complex antenna systems: additive and subtractive hybrid processing
- Materials coating techniques for high-performance antenna systems
- Multimaterial antenna fabrication
- Nano/micro processing techniques for miniaturized antennas
- Heterogeneous integration and processing techniques for antenna-in-package and chip-to-chip communications
- Functional RF Materials for Reconfigurable Antennas:
- Shape-memory materials for reconfigurable antennas: Shape-memory alloy and shape-memory polymer
- Electromagnetic absorbing materials/magnetic materials for frequency-selective surfaces and absorbers
- Phase-tunable materials for beamforming, beam steering and beam shaping
- Magnetic materials and multiferroics for advanced antenna systems
- RF materials formulation
- Tunable RF materials stimulation/modelling techniques
- Material training/stimuli strategies: Electrical, heat, light, magnetic waves
- Next generation of semiconductor materials for on-chip antennas
- Materials and Enabling Technologies for Antenna Characterization and Applications:
- Material characterization and measurement methods of the new material
- Biomedical, medicine and healthcare applications
- Electromagnetic skins
- Emerging wireless applications such as 6G and IoT
- Wireless power transfer
- Satellite antenna systems and space applications
- Emerging wireless paradigms with advanced materials and intelligent manufacturing technologies:
- Antenna design using sustainable and green fabrication technologies
- AI-driven design and optimization
Supporting Technical Committees:
- TC-8 (Leading): Wireless Communication
- TC-1 (Supporting): Antennas
- TC-2 (Supporting): Arrays
- TC-4 (Supporting): Metamaterials
- TC-7 (Supporting): Antenna Measurements
- TC-11 (Supporting): Health & Medicine
- TC-12 (Supporting): Space
Data and Code Sharing
All authors are invited to share via IEEE Data Port and IEEE Code Ocean the used data and developed codes to enhance the reproducibility and visibility of the articles published in the Special Issue.
Keywords
- Additive manufacturing
- RF/microwave materials
- Antenna fabrication
- Metamaterials and metasurfaces
- Reconfigurable antennas
- Multimaterial processing
- Nano/Microfabrication
- AI-driven design
- Sustainable manufacturing
- 6G wireless systems
Guest Editors
Yang Yang: University of Technology Sydney, Australia,
Atif Shamim (FIEEE): KAUST, Saudi Arabia,
Wonbin Hong (FIEEE): POSTECH, South Korea,
Yang Hao (FIEEE): Queen Mary University of London, UK,
Eva Rajo-Iglesias (FIEEE): University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain,
Manos M. Tentzeris (FIEEE): Georgia Institute of Technology, USA,
Important Dates
Submission deadline: 31 October 2026
AI- and Digital-Twin-Enabled Reconfigurable Metasurfaces for Sensing, Communications and Radar Imaging
Reconfigurable metasurfaces and reflectarrays have emerged as key enabling technologies for next-generation electromagnetic systems, including 6G communications, wireless power transfer, sensing, imaging, and autonomous platforms. By tailoring the electromagnetic response of subwavelength unit cells, these architectures allow for unprecedented control of amplitude, phase, polarization, and wavefront shape, enabling functions previously difficult and/or costly using conventional antenna technologies. Also, programmable and reconfigurable metasurfaces are opening new possibilities for adaptive radar sensing and imaging, where dynamically controlled electromagnetic apertures can enhance target detection, imaging resolution, and environmental awareness
At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital-twin (DT) methodologies are becoming powerful tools for the design, optimization, and operation of complex electromagnetic systems. DTs are becoming popular for system design as they provide virtual representations of the physical EM system that is updated, validated, or synchronized using measurements, operational data, or hardware state information, and that can support prediction, calibration, diagnosis, optimization, or closed-loop control. Some examples are external control circuits, non-linearities, and 3rd party equipment insertions into larger systems for measurement-based calibration, compensation of fabrication tolerances and element failures for applications to real-time beamforming, metasurface reconfiguration, RIS-assisted channel modeling or sensing.
DTs have also found applications in imaging to detect early cancer cells by generating simulated images of abnormalities for insertion into deep learning networks. Similar methods can be used for identifying sub-micron defects in RF manufacturing followed by real-time reconfiguration during the manufacturing process. Coupled with AI/deep learning, these approaches have a growing potential for transformative impacts across the areas of RF sensing, radar and communication links.
Based on the above examples, AI-assisted inverse design, physics-informed neural networks, and hybrid data-driven/physics-based solvers can drastically accelerate the exploration of large design spaces, while digital electromagnetic twins can enable continuous synchronization between virtual models and physical metasurface or reflectarray platforms. These advances open new opportunities for closed-loop optimization, in-situ calibration, fault diagnosis, real-time reconfiguration, intelligent sensing and radar imaging applications.
The entire scientific community is invited to submit papers that fall within the scope of reconfigurable metasurfaces and reflectarrays with AI and DT technology. Also, the proposed Special Issue welcomes contributions that demonstrate how AI, deep learning or DT concepts advance metasurface and reflectarray designs, including their application into practical systems. Contributions are welcomed by the entire electromagnetics community. Authors of papers presented at the triennial 2026 URSI General Assembly and Scientific Symposium to be held in Krakow, Poland are also invited to contribute expanded versions of conference papers to this Special Issue.
This Special Issue aims to provide a focused venue for recent advances at the intersection of reconfigurable metasurfaces/reflectarrays and AI/DTs. Topics to be highlighted are:
- AI-assisted design, optimization, and control of metasurfaces and reflectarrays, including physics-informed neural networks, knowledge-guided deep learning, and AI-enhanced global optimizers for pattern synthesis, bandwidth enhancement, and polarization control.
- DT concepts for metasurface- and reflectarray-based systems, spanning high-fidelity EM modeling, model-measurement synchronization, and real-time co-simulation for communication, sensing, and wireless power transfer scenarios.
- Reconfigurable architectures and unit cells (e.g., varactor-loaded, liquid-crystal, MEMS, time-modulated, non-local or non-reciprocal designs) that enable dynamic beam shaping, near-field manipulation, and analog computation.
- Measurement, calibration, and error-modeling methods tailored to programmable metasurfaces and reflectarrays, including compact test ranges, production-line testing concepts, modeling of experimental uncertainties, and DT based correction techniques.
- Application-driven platforms where reconfigurable metasurfaces and reflectarrays are integrated with AI/ DT, such as:
- UAV-enabled wireless power transfer and sensing, including beamforming
- Indoor and vehicular channel emulation with RIS-assisted DTs,
- Wearable and conformal metasurface antennas,
- High-frequency (mmWave/THz/W-band) reconfigurable apertures for 6G and beyond.4
Data and Code Sharing
All authors are invited to share via IEEE Data Port (ieee-dataport.org) and IEEE Code Ocean (innovate.ieee.org/ieee-code-ocean) the used data and developed codes to enhance the reproducibility and visibility of the articles published in the Special Issue.
Keywords
- Reconfigurable Metasurfaces
- Reflectarrays
- Digital Twins
- Artificial Intelligence
- Physics-Informed Machine Learning
- Electromagnetic Optimization
- Intelligent RF Systems
Guest Editors
John L. Volakis (Lead), Florida International University, USA (
Sembiam R. Rengarajan, California State University, USA (
Christos G. Christodoulou, University of New Mexico, USA (
Ahmad Hoorfar, Villanova University, USA (
Filippo Costa, University of Pisa, Italy (
Grzegorz Bogdan, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland (
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: 31 January 2027
Final Decision: 31 July 2027
Publication Date: 31 October 2027