Status and development of soft ferrite industry

China's magnetic materials industry has become a global leader from a negligible industry with its abundant resources and labor advantages, as well as the support of huge domestic and international markets. Looking at the needs of international and domestic market development, the market prospects for magnetic materials are very bright. However, facing the structural adjustment of the information industry, today's 5G communications, mobile internet, computer notebook, TV flat panel, automotive electronics, and energy-saving lighting make China's magnetic materials industry in a new era of development opportunities and challenges. The application of information technology continues to expand, and electronic products continue to move toward digitalization, which places new demands on electronic devices and materials, such as miniaturization, high frequency, high performance, low loss, and low noise. Some people say: "In the past, it was a plug-in, it is now a patch, and it will be integrated in the future." However, China's magnetic materials products, in terms of technical performance, production equipment, product quality and qualification rate, compared with foreign advanced technology, there is still a gap. We must clearly understand this in order to strive to improve material performance and product quality. In the next few years, it will be a period of high-end product development, while the middle and low-end products will gradually shrink. If they do not catch up, China's magnetic materials products will lose market.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry, the total number of mobile phone users in China has reached 1.57 billion, and the net increase in 2010 is 149 million. In 2018, China’s total mobile phone shipments exceeded 400 million units, and the mobile phone industry’s output in the year was close to 1.8 billion units. Today, China has become the world's largest producer, exporter and consumer of consumer electronics. In 2018, China's mobile phone, computer and color TV production accounted for 90%, 90% and 70% of the world's total output, ranking first in the world. Along with the improvement of the overall production capacity of domestic electronics manufacturing industry and the continuous optimization of products, higher requirements are placed on the performance and quality of upstream magnetic materials and electronic components. Magnetic materials must meet the requirements of high frequency, miniaturization, patching, high magnetic performance, low loss and resistance to electromagnetic interference.

In terms of consumer electronics, as the clock frequency of electronic components in notebooks, computers, mobile phones, etc. is increased and miniaturized, the components of the application must also be correspondingly high-frequency, chip-shaped, such as: 1, reduce the power line and the ground a ferrite soft magnetic common mode filter that produces noise, 2, a chip bead filter that removes higher harmonic noise components that distort the digital signal, 3, a noise shielding absorber, 4, clamped on the cable The noise filter, 5, the DC voltage supplied by the battery becomes the DC voltage of the DC-DC converter required for the DC voltage of the circuit, 6, the DC-AC inverter for the high AC voltage of the LCD backlight, 7, which requires a large Reduce magnetic loss to achieve low-heat, energy-saving ferrite transformer cores, 8, HDD/DVD/FDD drivers, giant magnetoresistive heads, voice coil motor magnets, spindle motors, and magnets for optical pickup motors. 9, IEEE1394/USB interface anti-interference chip magnetic beads, common mode filter core. 10. Magnets mainly used in acoustic devices and fan motors, which require thin and high performance NdFeB materials.

Color TV has always played an important role in China's consumer electronics products. In 2018, China produced 200 million color TV sets, accounting for more than 70% of the world's total output. The future development of color TVs is high-definition, large-screen and digital filtering, and flat-panel TVs account for about 60%. This is more stringent for magnetic material products; (1) high frequency, requiring ferrite power cores have a higher operating frequency. (2) High definition, requiring power transformer power stability, material power loss is small, saturation magnetization is large. (3) The image is stable and the color is bright. It is required to use high magnetic permeability material and anti-electromagnetic interference soft magnetic faucet core and high performance focusing piece. (4) The development of digitalization, the requirements for power loss, magnetic permeability and frequency of use of soft magnetic materials are higher than those of analog. (5) The International Energy Agency stipulates that the standby power of color TVs should be reduced to 1 watt, which puts new requirements on low-loss power ferrite materials. From the development of color TV market in the future, high-grade soft ferrite will account for 80% of the total.

In the automotive industry, magnetic materials also have a wide range of applications. In the future, the car will be developed towards energy saving, environmental protection, miniaturization and light weight, and some of them will be replaced by neodymium iron boron magnets. With the widespread use of high-intensity discharge lighting and automotive power supply to 42 volts, the application of wide temperature, high frequency, low loss ferrite soft magnetic in DC-DC transformers will also increase rapidly. In particular, electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles are developing rapidly. Domestic and foreign auto companies are striving to overcome high-efficiency electric drives and high-efficiency motors. Toyota has successfully developed the PRIUS utility hybrid car. The magnets in the international auto market are basically not. Can have a share of China, and the domestic market is mostly imported. Hybrid vehicles mainly use magnetic materials, such as electric DC-DC converters: resonant circuits are used to enhance efficiency and reduce noise. High power is supplied through a parallel internal converter. LED display: Since its introduction, organic electroluminescent displays have been characterized by long life, high definition and low energy consumption, bringing new applications for power cores. Ferrite magnets; ferrite magnets are key components for high reliability and low cost of automotive engines. NdFeB magnets: NdFeB magnets have dozens of magnetic forces on ferrite magnets for ABS wheel sensors and hybrid/fuel cell automotive motors. In addition, in a car in which a large number of electronic circuits are incorporated in a limited space, the electronic circuit is easily interfered by electromagnetic wave noise, and the EMC core is the best countermeasure.

In addition, car navigation systems are recognized as the "brains" of cars, and continue to develop in the direction of automatic assisted driving. The evolution of power, electronic control and auxiliary functions in the body is rapid, including the new generation of data storage from DVD to mobile hard disk. The magnetic materials mainly include DC-AC inverters, DC-DC converters, EMC noise filters and HDD and DVD motor magnets.

In terms of energy conservation and environmental protection, due to environmental protection and energy shortages, future green energy sources such as wind power and solar power will flourish. Wind power development and solar power generation require current inverter devices, which will also be a huge market for soft ferrites.