Patco Electronics
Patco Electronics was founded in the fall of 1992 to provide the electronics industry with advanced battery management tools covering the chemistries used in secondary batteries. The first product was a lead-acid battery manager designed around the Unitrode 3906 lead-acid controller. From there, Patco expanded the lead-acid product line to include high-current managers for larger batteries and algorithms for the unique structure of lead-acid batteries. Next came the NiCAD and NiMH managers designed around specialty controllers. The third product line targeted 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 and not only affects the life expectancy of the electrical components used in the battery manager, but also interferes with the temperature detection of the managed battery. Through a proprietary control method, the Patco engineering team has developed a technology that uses the control information fed back from the battery management chip to control the main switching circuit, thereby generating low-voltage power consumption on the battery. This method solves a lot of the heat problems that traditional methods have to deal with. By the fall of 1996, Patco Electronics had a 10,000 square foot facility located on five acres in the Space Center Industrial Park adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center.