Electromagnetic properties of microwave sintered ferromagnetic-ferroelectric composites for application in low temperature co-fired ceramic devices

In this paper, microwave sintering (MS) technology has been applied in the preparation of ferromagnetic-ferroelectric composites. Several kinds of (Ni0.3Zn0.6Cu0.1)Fe2O4 (NiCuZn) ferrite with different contents of BaTiO3(BT) have been fabricated by MS technology. We found that the sintering time and temperature were significantly reduced from 22 h and 1100  °C for the conventional sintering (CS) process to 2 h and 840 °C for MS process, respectively. Experiments show that MS treated NiCuZn-BT composites possess both excellent ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties. For the composites of NiCuZn added with 15% BaTiO3, the real part of permittivity is larger than 50 below 20 MHz and the real part of dielectric constant is larger than 18 below 1 GHz. Our results indicate that the microwave sintering method is a potential important technique in LTCC technology.