Effects of annealing and pulse plating on soft magnetic properties of electroplated Fe-Ni films

We have already reported that Fe-Ni films prepared in citric-acid-based plating baths show good soft magnetic properties. In this paper, we investigated the effect of the grain size of the Fe-Ni crystalline phase in the films on magnetic properties, and employed an annealing and a pulse plating method in order to vary the grain size. The coercivity of the annealed Fe-Ni films at 600 °C shows large value, and good correlation between the grain growth and the coercivity was observed. The pulse plating enables us to reduce the grain size of the as-plated Fe-Ni films compared with the DC plating method, and we realized smooth surface and low coercivity of the Fe-Ni films using the pulse plating method. From these results, we confirmed the importance of the reduction in the grain size, and concluded that a pulse plating is an effective method to improve the good soft magnetic properties for our previously-reported Fe-Ni films.