Voltage Tunable Magnetoelectric Inductors With Improved Operational Frequency and Quality Factor for Power Electronics

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Inductors find widespread use in various applications. Inductors with a large tunability of inductance and quality factor would lead to new paradigm on circuit designs. In this paper, we investigated the effect of ferromagnetic layer thickness on the performance of a magnetoelectric tunable inductor. Using chemical etching, the thickness of Metglas ribbons (2605SA1) can be reduced from 24 to about 8μm, which dramatically reduces the eddy-current loss at higher frequencies. With the same total thickness, compared with inductor constructed with unthinned Metglas layers (2605CO), the maximum quality factor can be increased for 80%, and the operational frequency range can be extended for10×to the >10 MHz range. An inductance tunable range ofL ₘₐₓ/Lₘᵢₙ= 370%was also achieved together with a significantly enhanced quality factor by~ 3.Furthermore, with an inductor constructed with single thin Metglas (2605HB1M) layer, the maximum quality factor can be increased by 150% with single PZT slab and by 235% with double PZT slabs, and the operational frequency range can be extended by100×with single slab and by200×with double slabs, which makes these metallic magnetic ribbons tunable inductors competitive with ferrite materials in adaptive inductive power supply systems.