1. Introduction Electromagnetic absorbing materials have been extensively studied for use in reducing reflections for a wide variety of applications, ranging from stealth technology to anechoic chambers. One of the most popular techniques is based on a Salisbury screen design, which consists of a resistive sheet placed a quarter-wavelength above a PEC ground plane separated by a dielectric layer [I]. However, for many applications the Salisbury screen is prohibitively thick and a more compact structure is desired. Recently, metamaterial surfaces have been utilized in the design of thin absorber screens [2]. Additionally, they have been utilized in the design of ultra-thin single-bandgap electromagnetic absorbers [3], which were based on using a genetic algorithm to optimize a metallic pattern printed on a very thin dielectric substrate backed by a PEC ground plane. Electromagnetic interference due to multiple reflections also poses a problem for wireless local area networks, and therefore designs that minimize this effect are also of interest. To suppress multiple reflections, a novel absorptive/transmissive FSS was investigated in [4] using a two layer cross dipole FSS screen, while a double-sided permeable wave absorber based on a resistive film design was reported in [5].Within the realm of metamaterial absorber design, multiband ultra-thin electromagnetic bandgap absorbers and double-sided absorber designs based on resistive frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) have not been widely investigated. In this paper, we present an efficient spectral-domain periodic method of moments (PMM) formulation for the analysis of resistive FSS screens embedded in a stratified medium. We apply a cascading procedure to generate a composite scattering matrix for the entire system consisting of multiple resistive FSS screens embedded in a stratified medium. In addition, the 2-D fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based method was applied to speed up calculation of the required impedance matrix elements. Moreover, an O(NlogN) FFT-based method with I-D implementation together with the sparse storage technique was employed to accelerate computation of the matrix-vector product within the bi-conjugate gradient (BCG) iterative solver. This hybrid method differs from the 2-D FFT techniques reported in [6]. Finally, this formulation will be applied to the design of multiband ultra-thin electromagnetic bandgap absorbers that operate over a wide range of incidence angles and double-sided wideband absorbers that employ resistive FSS screens.