The present invention provides an improved magnetic winding and method of calculating desired winding parameters (winding layer thickness, number of winding layers and number of turns per winding layer) for a winding in a magnetic component. The invention may be applied to general boundary conditions in a magnetic winding or component and considers relative phase displacement for sinusoidal and nonsinusoidal winding currents. Ratios of magnetic surface field intensities at corresponding inner and outer boundaries of one or more winding layer(s) are calculated, and considered with relative phase displacement to select magnetic winding configurations having desired or optimal power dissipation. In certain aspects, a normalized loss function f(H,R,B,Φ) is utilized to determine a preferred construction among a plurality of iteratively generated selections.