Microstructure and magnetic properties of microwave sintered NiCuZn ferrite for application in LTCC devices

Abstract In this work, the microwave sintering (MS) method was applied to fabricate NiCuZn ferrite at low sintering temperature. The microstructure, magnetic and dielectric properties of the MS treated ferrite were investigated. With this novel technique, high quality NiCuZn ferrites are obtained with a saturation magnetization of 30 emu/g. In the frequency range of 1 MHz–1.8 GHz, the real part of dielectric constant is between 8.2 and 18.3 and dielectric loss is between 0.04 and 0.21 respectively. More importantly, the sintering time and temperature were significantly reduced from 22 h and 1050 °C for the conventional sintering (CS) process to 2 h and 920 °C for MS process. Our results indicate that the microwave sintering method is a potential important technique in LTCC technology.