Patco Electronics 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.