2-Acylbenzothiazoles and bibenzo[
b][1, 4]thiazines are two classes of heterocyclic compounds containing both nitrogen and sulfur in the five- and six-membered ring, respectively, which could be used as multifunctional building units and valuable structural units in pharmaceutical chemistry, pesticides, industrial dyes and functional materials [
8,
9]. For example, benzothiazole is an important type of heterocyclic skeleton, which can be used for anticancer agents and enzyme inhibitors, and so on [
10]. In recent years, some practical methodologies have been reported to synthesize benzothiazole compounds [
11]. For instance, in 2012, Wu and co-workers reported an I
2-promoted oxidative cyclization reaction for the one-pot synthesis of 2-acylbenzothiazoles from methyl
o-aminobenzenethiols and ketones [
12]. In 2016, Wan
et al. also developed a tunable procedure for the synthesis of benzothiazole-based vicinal diketones or 2-aroylbenzothiazoles from
o-aminothiophenols [
13]. For the preparation of thiazines, several synthesis protocols have been achieved. For example, the oxidative coupling of 3-phenyl-2
H-1, 4-benzothiazine with highly explosive picric acid [
14]. Later, our group and Nguyen
et al. found that bibenzo[
b][1, 4]thiazines can be constructed through a one-step reaction of readily available 2, 2′-dithiodianiline or 2-aminothiophenol in the presence AIBN or TFA, respectively [
15,
16]. Some other methods require halogenated reagent, harsh reaction conditions, expensive catalysts, and additional ligands to proceed with the reactions, which accordingly would generate stoichiometric amounts of waste after the reactions[
17]. However, in the above-mentioned advances, most of the reactions need a long reaction time (up to 24 h) to get good yields. Thus, there is an incentive to develop efficient and green catalytic processes based on microwave technology to minimize the reaction time in terms of sustainability. We herein report an efficient condition-controlled reaction between aryl methyl ketones and disulfanediyldianilines under microwave-assisted conditions, which would generate bibenzo[
b][1, 4]thiazines or 2-acylbenzothiazoles as the main products in only 15 min, respectively (
Scheme 1).