The discipline of electromagnetic field and microwave technology is one of the firstly approved national key disciplines by the country, with doctoral programs and postdoctoral mobile stations. The discipline currently has the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Wave. The laboratory was approved by the State Planning Commission in 1991 and was established in 1993. The main research directions of the discipline include: artificial electromagnetic materials and computational electromagnetics, millimeter wave submillimeter wave theory and technology, RF and antenna technology for wireless communication.

The discipline currently has more than 80 faculty members and more than 300 graduate students. Among the faculty members, professor Zhongliang Sun is Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, professor Wei Hong is Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education/Winner of the National Outstanding Youth Fund/ IEEE Fellow, professor Tiejun Cui is Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education/Winner of the National Outstanding Youth Fund/ IEEE Fellow, professor Zhining Chen is Distinguished Oversea Professor of the Ministry of Education/IEEE Fellow. Many faculty members hold important positions in academic organizations and journal editorial committees. In 2004, the discipline was selected into the first batch of innovation teams of the Ministry of Education. In 2007, it became the innovation group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

In recent years, the annual average funding of the discipline has exceeded 50 million yuan. It has led many important research projects, such as 973 project, major project of the National Natural Science Foundation, National Science and Technology Major Project. The discipline won the first prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award, the second and the fourth prize of National Natural Science, the first and second prizes of provincial and ministerial level, and so on. In recent years, It has annually published about 70 academic papers in international journals such as Science, Nature Communications, Nature Scientific Report, PNAS, PRL, IEEE Trans. MTT/AP, APL, presented more than ten invited and keynote papers at international conferences, and authorized more than 20 national invention patents.

The discipline has now established an advanced software and hardware platform that can effectively support research on many frontier topics. The platform also supports the research and development of many universities and enterprises in China.