For more technical information please look at the official Magnetics Strip Wound Core Design Manual.


Tape wound cores are made from thin strips of high permeability nickel-iron alloys such as; Orthonol®, Square Permalloy 80, Supermalloy and Alloy 48, or grain oriented silicon iron known as Magnesil®. Materials are produced in thicknesses from 0.0005” through 0.004”, for a wide range of frequency applications, and are wound into toroidal shapes varying from fractions of a gram to hundreds of kilograms in weight. All materials can be provided in phenolic or plastic, aluminum or insulation coated aluminum, protective cases. Magnesil material is also available unboxed or encapsulated with epoxy. Specific applications for tape wound cores include magnetic amplifiers (MagAmps), converter and inverter transformers, current transformers, and static magnetic devices.

Bobbin cores are miniature tape cores wound from ultra-thin nickel-iron strip on a stainless steel bobbin. Bobbin cores are manufactured from ultra-thin tape (0.000125" to 0.001" thickness) in Permalloy 80 and Orthonol and can be manufactured with widths of 0.031" to 0.250". Core diameters are available down to 0.050", or less on special request. Bobbin cores can switch from positive to negative saturation in a few microseconds or less, making them ideal for logic elements, serial/parallel data conversion, and generation of pulse patterns. Because of their temperature stability, low coercive values, and high saturation densities, they are often superior to other types of cores in computers, high frequency amplifiers, harmonic amplifiers, harmonic generators, pulse transformers, counters, and timers.

Magnetics cut cores are made from high permeability magnetic strip alloys of non-oriented nickel-iron Permalloy 80 (80% nickel in thicknesses fro 0.001” to 0.004”), grain-oriented Orthonol (50% nickel in thicknesses from 0.001’ to 0.004”) and highly refined Iron-Vanadium-Cobalt alloy Supermendur in 0.004” thickness. C and E cut cores are available in any practical size. Magnetics cut cores are ideal for medium and low frequency high power applications, in which the losses or saturation of silicon iron are not acceptable. The small gap introduced in cutting results in a core that will not saturate due to slight imbalance on the primary and secondary windings. Magnetics cut cores are often key components in power transformers, chokes, pulse transformers and high power inductors.

Magnetics tape wound cores are available in nickel-iron alloys and grain oriented silicon steel. At this time, Magnetics does not offer tape wound cores made with amorphous materials like Metlas® or nanocrystalline materials like Finemet® or Vitroperm®.

A common pitfall on testing square loop tape wound cores is to measure the inductance or AL value. Although this is a common measurement for ferrite and powder core materials, which are round loop materials, it is not a valid measurement for square loop materials like Permalloy, Orthonol, Magnesil, etc. An inductance measurement can be obtained on a square loop material, but it does not give any indication of the functional magnetic properties.

Additionally, the inductance measurement of the square loop material is not repeatable. This is due to the remanance of the core (Br). Any measurement, leaves the core at some Br rather than the origin, see the figure below. Factors such as application and removal of a DC bias field, proximity to a permanent magnet, partial demagnitazation, among other causes, results in a very unreliable and unrepeatable measurements. Furthermore, the square loop materials are processed to control saturation (Bm), coercive force (Hc) as well as Br. Square loop materials are not processed to control the initial magnetization curve, which yields the inductance. See the below figure.



For square loop materials including, Mag-Amp cores, a test of the core’s saturation level is far more useful. The test set-up shown below is commonly used to measure a cores saturation level. The core is typically wound with 10 turns and tested as follows:

he core is driven to a flux level which is about half of its saturation flux density, B1. For Permalloy this would be 3700 Gauss, Orthonol would be 7500 Gauss, and E material would be 2500 Gauss. The corresponding measured voltage, V1, is calculated by:



Vrms = 4.44 * Bpk * Ae * N * f * 10-8

B is in Gauss.

Ae is the effective area of the core in cm2.

N is turns.

f is frequency in Hertz.

With the voltage still at a level corresponding to half of the core’s saturation level, the peak current or I1 is observed on the scope.

The voltage is then increased while the current waveform on the scope increases to I2. The core is considered entering saturation when I2 = 3 * I1 and V2 is recorded. The above equation is then re-arranged to solve for B2, which is the core’s saturation flux density.