PATCO HISTORY
Patco Electronics, Inc. was founded in the fall of
1992, for the purpose of providing the electronics industry with state
of the art battery management tools spanning the chemistries employed
in secondary batteries. The first product was a battery manager for
lead acid batteries designed around the Unitrode 3906 lead acid controller.
From there Patco has expanded the lead acid line to include higher current
managers for larger batteries, and algorithms for unique construction
of lead acid batteries. NiCAD and NiMH managers designed around specialized
controllers came next. A third product line addresses the medium prismatic
Lithium Ion batteries manufactured by Saft America.
Patco has developed a new technology for battery management
equipment. Heat is the enemy of electronics, interfering with both the
life expectancy of electrical elements employed in the battery manager
itself, and the sensing of temperature in the battery being managed.
Through a proprietary method of control, Patco's engineering group has
developed a technique of feeding back control information from the battery
management chip to control a primary switching circuit producing the
low voltage power for the battery. This approach eliminates much of
the heat that would have to be dealt with by conventional approaches.
As of the fall of 1996, Patco Electronics occupies
its own 10,000 square foot facility, situated on five acres in Spaceport
Center Industrial Park, just outside Kennedy Space Center.
|