Development of metallic glass loaded polymer paste

The electronics industry has been working towards the development of microsystems that achieved through miniaturization of components. Inductive components have resisted this trend due to problems in reducing the size of the magnetic core. A reduction in the size of the core leads to an increase in the operating frequency of the device. At high frequencies the properties of traditional soft magnetic materials are greatly diminished. A new material needs to be developed, which can be compatible with existing electronic production technology, e.g., screen printable thick film pastes. The important properties required in these materials would be low coercivity, low core losses, and high initial permeability. Metallic glasses in the ribbon form have been used as cores in many applications such as, power transformers and power amplifiers. In ribbon form, metallic glasses are not suitable for many engineering applications that require the product to be more complex in configuration and geometry. To solve this problem, generally the material is converted to powdered form. In this paper we investigate the development of a metallic glass loaded polymer paste using metallic powder prepared from precursor amorphous ribbons. The ribbon, powder and paste samples were characterized using a number of techniques: DSC, vibrating sample magnetometer, X-ray diffraction and impedance analyzer. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.