ABSTRACT
The magnetic material is the paramount player in the design of magnetic components. The magnetics
design engineer has three standard words when making the normal design trade-off study: cost, size, and
performance. The engineer will be happy to stuff any two in the bag. The magnetics design engineer is
now designing magnetic components that operate from below the audio range to the megahertz range. He is
normally asked to design for maximum performance, with the minimum of his parasitic friends' capacitance
and leakage inductance. Today, the magnetic materials, the engineer has to work with, are silicon steel,
nickel iron (permalloy), cobalt iron (permendur), amorphous metallic alloys, and ferrites. These also have spin-off material variants, such as moly-permalloy powder, sendust powder, and iron powder cores. From
this group of magnetic materials, the engineer will make trade-offs with the magnetic properties for his
design. These properties are: saturation Bs, permeability u, resistivity p (core loss), remanence Br, and coercivity Hc.
